Avelina AI
A self-hosted AI assistant that lives inside Telegram on your own server, with memory, emotional awareness, and dozens of built-in skills — useful if you want an AI that remembers your life and work without handing your data to a big tech company.
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Description
Most AI chat apps forget everything the moment you close the tab, and every message you send passes through someone else's servers. Avelina flips that: it's an AI assistant that lives inside Telegram — an app you probably already have open all day — but runs on a small server you rent and control yourself, a bit like having a personal assistant whose notebook you own instead of one that reports back to head office. It remembers past conversations, picks up on your mood, and can be taught new tricks over time instead of starting from zero every session.
Avelina is a self-hosted TypeScript stack installed onto your own VPS via a Telegram installer bot, in roughly 30 minutes. It combines a 4-layer typed memory system with full-text and vector search (FTS5), an 8-channel emotional-intelligence model, multi-agent sub-agent orchestration, and more than 50 pre-installed skills exposed through MCP (Model Context Protocol). It handles voice messages and files natively inside Telegram, ships weekly signed releases with self-evolution features, and — because everything runs on infrastructure you own — keeps conversations, projects, API keys and personal secrets off any third-party server. Team or family members can be added with their own sandboxed context. It runs on Anthropic's Claude Max plan as its reasoning engine, so the real monthly cost includes that subscription on top of Avelina itself.
💬 Our review
The short version: if you want an AI assistant that remembers everything about you long-term and lives in an app you already check dozens of times a day, Avelina is one of the few self-hosted options built specifically for that — but you're paying an upfront setup fee on top of a separate Claude subscription, not a simple monthly SaaS price.
Compared to just using ChatGPT or Claude's own apps, Avelina's pitch is memory and ownership: your history, secrets and automations stay on a VPS you control rather than inside a vendor's cloud, and the emotional-intelligence layer plus 50+ MCP skills push it closer to a personal operations hub than a chatbot. Against OpenClaw — the breakout self-hosted agent project of 2026 — Avelina is narrower and more polished for one specific channel (Telegram) rather than trying to be a general multi-app agent, which is an advantage if Telegram is genuinely your hub, and a limitation if it isn't.
The honest costs: €280 for self-install or €480 with a guided setup is a real one-time investment, and Avelina doesn't include the LLM itself — you still need an Anthropic Claude Max subscription (roughly $100/month) plus a few dollars a month for the VPS. That's a meaningfully higher total cost of ownership than a $20/month chatbot subscription, so it makes the most sense for someone who already lives in Telegram, cares enough about data ownership to self-host, and expects to use it heavily enough to justify the setup fee — not for someone who just wants occasional AI help.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
280€ (auto-installation) ou 480€ (installation + consultation) en paiement unique, plus un abonnement Anthropic Claude Max (~100$/mois) et l'hébergement VPS (~5-15$/mois) séparément.
Pros
Mémoire à 4 couches avec recherche full-text + vectorielle (FTS5), contrairement aux chatbots qui oublient tout
50+ skills pré-installés via MCP, directement dans Telegram (voix, fichiers inclus)
Auto-hébergé sur un VPS que vous possédez — données, secrets et automations ne quittent jamais votre serveur
Système d'intelligence émotionnelle à 8 canaux, rare parmi les assistants IA auto-hébergés
Cons
Coût total élevé : 280-480€ d'installation + abonnement Claude Max (~100$/mois) séparé, non inclus
Verrouillé sur Telegram comme interface principale — pas d'app native ou web
Nécessite de gérer soi-même un VPS, contrairement à un SaaS clé en main