The Single-Player Ceiling
If your team wants to try one of these today, here is what actually exists, what it costs, and what it genuinely shares across people. This page is a decision aid, not a fresh case for the gap — The Team Second Brain already makes that case. Every option below is real, and every one has a self-serve path a small team could set up this week — except where noted below.
Self-hosted: free, but someone sets it up¶
- AnythingLLM — open-source (MIT), free to run via Docker. Built for multiple users from the start: a document embedded once becomes available to everyone in the workspace, with role-based access. A managed cloud option exists too. It runs $50 a month under five seats, or $99 a month for the Pro tier (AnythingLLM, 2026).
- Onyx (formerly Danswer) — open-source (MIT), self-hostable, indexes connected tools such as Slack, Confluence, GitHub, and Drive into one shared, searchable corpus. A managed cloud plan runs $20 a user a month, with no stated seat minimum (Onyx, 2026).
- Khoj — open-source, free to self-host, built as "your AI second brain." The individual version is genuinely free. The team version exists but carries no public price — it is sales-gated, the one part of Khoj that is not self-serve (Khoj, 2026).
- The raw implementations of Andrej Karpathy's own LLM Wiki pattern — projects such as nashsu/llm_wiki and AgriciDaniel/claude-obsidian — are free, open, and well built. Every one of them is scoped to a single person's own machine and accounts. None adds a second user.
Accessible SaaS: no setup, still one person at a time¶
- Claude Team runs $25 a user a month monthly, or $20 annual, self-serve for 5 to 150 seats (Claude, 2026). A Project's uploaded files and instructions are genuinely shared across every member with access. Whether one person's own chat history feeds that shared knowledge is a separate question the product does not answer.
- ChatGPT Business runs $20 to $25 a user a month, self-serve, with a two-seat minimum (ChatGPT, 2026). A Project shares a knowledge base and a memory across its members. A Custom GPT does not. One person configures it, and everyone else draws on that same fixed setup. Nothing anyone else does with it feeds back into what the GPT knows.
- Notion AI requires its Business tier, at $20 to $24 a month, for the full AI feature set (Notion, 2026). It answers by searching the team's already-written wiki pages. It shares what people chose to type up, not what anyone actually asked the AI on the way there.
- Obsidian — Sync ($4 to $5 a user a month) supports a shared vault, with no real-time co-editing (Obsidian, 2026). Its most popular AI plugin, Smart Connections, is free and genuinely useful, but built and described as one person's tool.
Where every one of them stops¶
All eight options share the same limit: each compounds a document, a project, or a folder someone chose to save — never a person's ongoing use of AI itself.
| Option | Type | Price | What actually compounds |
|---|---|---|---|
| AnythingLLM | Self-hosted | Free; $50-$99/mo cloud option | Every embedded document, across the whole workspace |
| Onyx | Self-hosted | Free; $20/user/mo managed | Everything indexed from connected tools |
| Khoj | Self-hosted | Free; team tier needs a sales call | Nothing beyond one person, without that call |
| Karpathy-pattern repos | Self-hosted | Free | Nothing — single-user by design |
| Claude Team | SaaS | $20-25/user/mo | A Project's own files and instructions |
| ChatGPT Business | SaaS | $20-25/user/mo | A Project's knowledge base and memory, not a Custom GPT |
| Notion AI | SaaS | $20-24/mo (Business) | Team wiki pages someone already wrote |
| Obsidian + Sync | SaaS add-on | $4-5/user/mo | A shared vault, no real-time co-editing |
Building Yours Without an Engineer picks a starting point from this table and sketches what it'd take to run it.
Sources¶
- AnythingLLM — AnythingLLM Pricing, 2026. Basic $50/mo, for teams of less than 5 users; Pro $99/mo. View source · verified 2026-07-05 · primary
- Onyx — Onyx Pricing, 2026. $20 per user/month. View source · verified 2026-07-05 · primary
- Khoj — Khoj Teams (product page), 2026. tell them about what you're looking for, how big your team is, and what your needs are. View source · verified 2026-07-05 · ⚠ secondary mirror
- Anthropic — Claude Pricing, 2026. $25/person/month billed monthly, $20/person/month billed annually. View source · verified 2026-07-05 · primary
- OpenAI — ChatGPT Business Pricing, 2026. $20/user/month on an annual plan or $25/user/month monthly, with a 2-seat minimum. View source · verified 2026-07-05 · ⚠ secondary mirror
- Notion — Notion Pricing, 2026. Business: $20/mo per member billed annually, $24/mo per member billed monthly. View source · verified 2026-07-05 · primary
- Obsidian — Obsidian Pricing, 2026. Sync: $4/mo billed annually, $5/mo billed monthly. View source · verified 2026-07-05 · primary