About us.

Who we are.

We are the team behind Goodfolk, a European software studio building sovereign, open-source-rooted products for independent creators and developers. Goodfolk also runs QuietJar, a donation platform for European creators.

Chersus came out of that work: the same care for craft, compliance, and quiet infrastructure, pointed at the most repetitive calls in the AI stack.

Why we exist.

Every interesting feature ships as an API call, and the going advice is to call more of them. But the calls you make most - cleaning a support ticket, routing a message, checking a prompt - are also the ones heavy generative models price absurdly.

We build the opposite. Small, single-purpose models that do one job in milliseconds, on CPUs, with zero hallucination risk and no token arithmetic. The result sits in the empty corner of the market: hyperscaler convenience without hyperscaler cost, self-hosting economics without self-hosting maintenance.

Where we run.

Sovereign European infrastructure across 26 EU cities, from Amsterdam to Zagreb. Requests never leave European jurisdiction. We act as processor under Art. 28 GDPR, with a simple DPA and a really short subprocessor list.

What we will never do.

We will never paywall a capability. The free tier gives you every service, at full quality, forever. When companies scale, they pay for scale - single sign-on, audit logs, custom uptime SLAs, dedicated single-tenant European clusters - never for the model features themselves.

Why we are named Chersus.

Chersus takes its name from the historical genus of the Mediterranean land tortoise, rooted in the ancient Greek word chersos - solid ground.

And yes, the tortoise and the hare. We find it funny: the overconfident hare takes an enormous lead, loses focus, and falls asleep halfway through the race. The tortoise simply keeps moving at a steady pace, passes the sleeping hare, and wins.

Heavy generative models sprint in bursts, bill you for the spectacle, and doze off on your latency budget. Our micro-models just keep moving. Slow and steady is not a joke here - it is the architecture ... except that it is super fast.