Secure, Privately Hosted AI: What It Is, How It Works, and How Much It Costs

At my company Shinydocs, we recently hosted two educational webinars on secure, privately hosted AI.

The same three questions kept coming up:

1. What is privately hosted AI?
2. How does it work?
3. And how much does it cost?

In this post, I'll break it all down fast and clear.

Like what you see? Want to see more? I invite you to chat with my team at Shinydocs.

What Is Secure, Privately Hosted AI?

You have files - maybe on file shares, SharePoint, or iManage. You want to use AI to analyze and search through them, but you don’t want your data vulnerable in the cloud.

That’s where secure, privately hosted AI comes in to ensure:

• Your files stay in an isolated, secure environment.
• Nobody sees your data except you.

To put it plain and simple: No exposure. No risk of IP leakage. Just full control.

How It Works

It doesn’t matter if your environment is on-premises or private cloud - with Shinydocs, it works like this:

1. Populate secure storage: Upload your relevant documents to your secure storage (on-prem or private cloud).
2. Shinydocs processes locally: Shinydocs run locally in your environment (no data leaves your environment), so your files become privately searchable by AI.
3. Use AI to ask your documents questions: With our AI-powered search UI (also runs in your environment), you can ask real questions and get real answers from your internal content.

See Secure, Privately Hosted AI in Action

I had a little fun playing around with this to show you the potential.

In this quick demo, I uploaded all the JFK papers and used AI to ask some example questions about the docs and get even cooler answers - check this out!

This is ChatGPT and Gemini-level AI power, but pointed only at the documents you choose with zero data leaving your control.

How Much Does It Cost?

Let's be 100% clear here.  This costs 1/100th of what you'd pay for the Cloud AI providers.  They are at least 6.3 cents PER PAGE!!! Each time you look at your documents it costs you A LOT of money.

For us, it is one subscription price.  No per-page (or per token, or per whatever) charges.

You control where your data lives. You control who sees it.

In our world, there’s no such thing as 100% security, but there is 100% control.

Why This Matters

AI is only as useful as it is trustworthy. And for many organizations, the idea of sending sensitive documents to a public cloud AI system raises red flags.

Public cloud AI systems are risky because:

• Potential for IP leakage
• Less privacy
• Less control

By contrast, privately hosted AI offers:

• Secure access to your content
• Fast AI-powered answers
• Full ownership of your data

That means no more digging through folders. No more reading every document. And no more chasing down teammates on Zoom just to get the info you need.

Privately hosted AI delivers the insights without the risks.

What are some use cases?

Here are a few interesting use cases for privately hosted AI we've seen so far:

• Legal: Search across matters and find specific details fast
• Corporate: Dig into client or project history without reading every document manually
• Industrial: Identify key supplier or asset information instantly

Get all of the benefits of leveraging AI, without the potential risks of cloud-based AI.