The value of a personal AI agent drops if you can only use it when sitting at your desk. You want to kick off a research task from your phone during lunch, check agent progress from your tablet, or stop a runaway process from anywhere.
Cloud-hosted agents solve this by running everything on remote servers. But that means your files, credentials, and browsing sessions live on someone else's infrastructure. Foxl takes a different path: run locally, access remotely.
The encrypted relay
Foxl's relay server (relay.foxl.ai) is a Cloudflare Worker that handles authentication and message routing. When your desktop app connects, it establishes a WebSocket tunnel to the relay. Your phone or any browser connects to app.foxl.ai and talks to the same relay.
Messages between devices are end-to-end encrypted. The relay sees routing metadata (which device is talking to which) but cannot read message content. If the relay goes down, your local agent keeps running - you just lose remote access until it recovers.
What you can do remotely
- Chat with your agent - full conversation with tool calls, thinking blocks, streaming
- View terminal output - see shell sessions running on your desktop
- Monitor subagents - real-time progress of parallel tasks
- Stop processes - halt a runaway agent or cancel a shell command
- Switch models - change from Sonnet to Opus mid-conversation
Cost optimization
The relay uses Cloudflare Durable Objects with Hibernatable WebSocket API. When no web clients are connected, the desktop app slows its heartbeat to once every 5 minutes. When a client connects, it speeds up to 30-second intervals. This reduces Durable Object costs by ~90% compared to always-on polling.
On-demand heartbeats, HTTP liveness checks, and chat delta batching (100ms windows) keep the estimated cost under $5/month for hundreds of daily active users.
No account required for local use
The relay is optional. If you only use Foxl from your desk, you never need to create an account. The desktop app works fully offline with your own API keys. The relay adds remote access and the web dashboard - both free.
