Vellum
Personal AI assistant that learns your patterns and acts on your behalf.
What is Vellum?
Vellum (vellum.ai) is a personal AI assistant platform offered across web, macOS, iOS, and CLI that learns user-specific patterns through episodic, semantic, procedural, and emotional memory. It operates in three phases: hatching (setup), teaching (correction), and relying (autonomous action), with privacy enforced by keeping credentials in the user's macOS Keychain or an isolated vault. The product explicitly opts out of using conversations for model training.
Knowledge bases, internal search, operations, data, finance, HR, and back-office tools with AI workflows.
See the full Knowledge & Ops guide to compare more tools, buyer criteria, and related workflows.
Use cases to evaluate
Letting an assistant triage and summarize an overflowing inbox each morning
Coordinating calendar across multiple parties without manual back-and-forth
Running a CLI assistant that remembers your tech stack preferences (e.g. TypeScript over YAML)
Holding pings and notifications during focus blocks based on learned context
Fit to evaluate
Independent operators and solo founders juggling many threads
Engineers wanting a CLI-resident assistant in their dev loop
Busy parents coordinating household schedules
Privacy-conscious users who need credentials kept in Keychain
Business fit
Right for you if you're a knowledge worker who wants a persistent assistant across web, desktop, mobile, and terminal that remembers your preferences and can act with graduated autonomy. It fits people drowning in calendar, email, and messaging coordination who are willing to invest in teaching it. Skip if you were looking for the Vellum LLM development platform at vellum.com (a different product), if you need team-shared agents rather than personal ones, or if you can't tolerate any cloud component in your assistant workflow.
How to evaluate Vellum
Use this category when operational data, policies, tasks, or internal requests are spread across disconnected systems.
Confirm the exact workflow
Map Vellum to one concrete workflow first, such as letting an assistant triage and summarize an overflowing inbox each morning. Avoid buying before the owner, trigger, output, and success metric are clear.
Check category fit
Compare internal search, permissions, workflow support, and reporting.
Compare practical alternatives
Shortlist Vellum against Glean, Guru, Slite so the decision is based on fit, effort, and workflow ownership rather than brand recognition alone.
Validate cost and rollout effort
Credit-based: Vellum Credits are purchased in $10 USD increments up to $100 per transaction, with 1 credit = $1. No markup on underlying model costs (passes through to providers). Auto-Reload thresholds configurable from $1-$100 with optional monthly caps up to $10,000. Credits cover LLM inference, web search, image generation, and paid third-party APIs. No free tier disclosed in pricing docs. Also confirm implementation time, support needs, and whether the medium setup matches your team.
Compare Vellum with alternatives
Use this quick comparison before booking demos or moving data into a new system.
| Primary workflow | Letting an assistant triage and summarize an overflowing inbox each morning, Coordinating calendar across multiple parties without manual back-and-forth |
|---|---|
| Best-fit team | Independent operators and solo founders juggling many threads, Engineers wanting a CLI-resident assistant in their dev loop |
| Implementation effort | Medium setup and maintenance profile |
| Pricing check | Usage-based |
| Closest alternatives | GleanGuruSliteSlab |
Vellum pricing
| Model | Usage-based |
|---|---|
| Snapshot | Credit-based: Vellum Credits are purchased in $10 USD increments up to $100 per transaction, with 1 credit = $1. No markup on underlying model costs (passes through to providers). Auto-Reload thresholds configurable from $1-$100 with optional monthly caps up to $10,000. Credits cover LLM inference, web search, image generation, and paid third-party APIs. No free tier disclosed in pricing docs. |
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Common questions about Vellum
What is Vellum?
Vellum (vellum.ai) is a personal AI assistant platform offered across web, macOS, iOS, and CLI that learns user-specific patterns through episodic, semantic, procedural, and emotional memory. It operates in three phases: hatching (setup), teaching (correction), and relying (autonomous action), with privacy enforced by keeping credentials in the user's macOS Keychain or an isolated vault. The product explicitly opts out of using conversations for model training.
What is Vellum used for?
Common use cases: Letting an assistant triage and summarize an overflowing inbox each morning; Coordinating calendar across multiple parties without manual back-and-forth; Running a CLI assistant that remembers your tech stack preferences (e.g. TypeScript over YAML); Holding pings and notifications during focus blocks based on learned context.
How much does Vellum cost?
Credit-based: Vellum Credits are purchased in $10 USD increments up to $100 per transaction, with 1 credit = $1. No markup on underlying model costs (passes through to providers). Auto-Reload thresholds configurable from $1-$100 with optional monthly caps up to $10,000. Credits cover LLM inference, web search, image generation, and paid third-party APIs. No free tier disclosed in pricing docs.
Who is Vellum best for?
Vellum fits Independent operators and solo founders juggling many threads, Engineers wanting a CLI-resident assistant in their dev loop, Busy parents coordinating household schedules, Privacy-conscious users who need credentials kept in Keychain. Right for you if you're a knowledge worker who wants a persistent assistant across web, desktop, mobile, and terminal that remembers your preferences and can act with graduated autonomy. It fits people drowning in calendar, email, and messaging coordination who are willing to invest in teaching it. Skip if you were looking for the Vellum LLM development platform at vellum.com (a different product), if you need team-shared agents rather than personal ones, or if you can't tolerate any cloud component in your assistant workflow.
What are alternatives to Vellum?
Common alternatives to Vellum include Glean, Guru, Slite, Slab, Tettra, Sana.