Skales: review, pricing, security and alternatives

What Skales does

Skales belongs to the personal assistants family: general-purpose agents, often self-hosted and driven from a messaging app, that act for you on your files, accounts and services. On our grid it ranks #35 of the 46 projects of this family listed in the directory.

You use it from: desktop app and mobile app. Usable models: local models (Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM…). It can run on your own machine or server.

Who is Skales for?

It targets individuals and freelancers who want an assistant able to act for them day to day, often from a messaging app. Typical tasks people give it:

• sort e-mail and draft replies
• manage a calendar and reminders
• look up information and summarise it
• run small recurring tasks

It is a good candidate if your data must stay on your machines and you want the option of a local model, with no API fees.

Access and human control

According to its documentation, Skales can:

• drive a web browser
• control the screen, keyboard and mouse

We could not establish whether it asks for human approval before sensitive actions: test it first on an unimportant account or folder.

Skales pricing

The code is public but the repository declares no licence: reuse is not formally allowed. The real cost comes from model calls: each loop step sends the whole context back to the model, and a task of several dozen steps can cost far more than a single question. The LLM price calculator estimates it for the chosen model.

Getting started with Skales

1. Install it by following the repository README.
2. Pick the model: an API key from a provider, or a local model if your machine has enough graphics memory (the VRAM calculator tells you).
3. Give it a first playground with nothing at stake: a test folder, a secondary account or a throwaway project. Only open your real accounts once you have seen how it behaves.
4. Give it a short, checkable task, review the result and its action log, then raise the difficulty step by step.

Security: risk level

A personal assistant often combines access to private data, reading outside content and sending messages: the combination that enables data leaks through prompt injection.

Points found for Skales:

• Sensitive access: it can control the screen, keyboard and mouse, with no established default human approval.
• Outside content: it reads web pages or API responses, which may contain booby-trapped instructions (prompt injection).
• No licence: legally shaky for company use.

Three habits: least privilege (minimal rights, dedicated keys), human approval for irreversible actions, a sandbox for code execution. The AI agent security check reviews your setup in a few minutes.

Project activity and releases

Created on March 8, 2026, the skalesapp/skales repository has 2,210 stars, 296 forks and 1 open issues, with 86 commits in total. It received changes this month.

Over the last 52 weeks: 85 commits, an average of 1.6 per week.

11 releases in total; 11 in the last twelve months. Latest release: v12.9.56, on October 22, 2026.

Skales vs other personal assistants

GitHub stars of the best-rated open-source projects in the personal assistants family. Stars measure attention, not quality: a heavily promoted project collects them fast, a specialised tool will have few.

Skales and other personal assistants at a glance

The 7 best-ranked agents in the same family, 7 of them open source. The score out of 100 only applies to open-source projects; for proprietary services we show the published entry price. A dash marks information the documentation does not state.

How we rated it

Score: 57/100, computed only from public, verifiable data, with no subjective testing or partnership:

• Adoption 16/40: 2,210 stars on a log scale (40 points from about 200,000).
• Activity 26/30: last commit less than a month ago, 11 releases in six months, 85 commits in a year.
• Framework 15/30: licence, default human approval, self-hosting, model choice and documentation site.

The score does not say whether the agent will succeed at your tasks: it measures how solid the project is. The full grid is on the method page.