ProductApril 2, 20264 min readFoxl Team

Remote Access Without the Cloud

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.

E2E encrypted relay architecture diagram

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.

Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5 on Amazon Bedrock today, and Foxl supports it on day one - across Foxl App, Foxl Code, and Foxl Notes, plus your Claude Pro/Max subscription. Opus 4.8 stays default; Fable is the new most-capable pick. The sharp edges we handled: a global-only inference profile, per-region data-retention opt-in (pinned to us-east-1), adaptive-only thinking, and a transient-5xx retry for the launch-day capacity ramp.

5 min read

Engineering

Foxl v0.3.0: Foxl Goes Mobile, Keyboard-Docked

The same web bundle that powers app.foxl.ai now wraps into a native iOS app with Capacitor - Agent, Notes, and the new in-app Foxl Code all at once. The hard parts: docking the chat composer flush on the keyboard the way Claude and ChatGPT do (resize:none + a single --keyboard-gap CSS variable), and a tap-offset bug from letting two layers own the safe area.

7 min read

All posts 73 Skills and Counting

Remote Access Without the Cloud

The encrypted relay

What you can do remotely

Cost optimization

No account required for local use

Read next

Introducing Foxl

Foxl v0.3.3: Claude Fable 5, Day-One Support

Foxl v0.3.0: Foxl Goes Mobile, Keyboard-Docked

The encrypted relay

What you can do remotely

Cost optimization

No account required for local use