Frequently asked questions

Everything you need to know about Mealissa — what it is, how it's secured, and how to get your local LLM online.

Product & positioning

What exactly is Mealissa?

Mealissa is a secure, OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible gateway that gives self-hosted local LLMs a globally accessible API endpoint, with prompts encrypted in transit and never stored. Run any Ollama model on your own machine and reach it from anywhere through one stable endpoint.

What problem does Mealissa solve?

Local LLMs are isolated by default — machines behind home or office routers have no safe, standard way to be reached from outside. Mealissa bridges your machine and the internet: your model becomes a production-grade API endpoint without open ports, certificates to manage, or your data resting in someone else's cloud.

Who is Mealissa designed for?

Developers and organizations running self-hosted models who want to reach them from apps, scripts, other machines, or teammates — without cloud GPU costs or vendor lock-in.

Why choose Mealissa over exposing Ollama directly, a VPN, or a tunneling service?

Exposing Ollama directly means an open, unauthenticated port on the internet. Tunnels and VPNs like ngrok or Tailscale solve transport but nothing else. Mealissa adds what those don't: Anthropic- and OpenAI-compatible APIs so existing SDKs work unchanged, license-key authentication on every call, a usage dashboard, multi-node groups — and zero prompt storage.

What are Mealissa's biggest limitations?

Today Mealissa fronts Ollama specifically, the agent runs on Windows 10/11 and Linux (x64), each plan caps the maximum model parameter size, and routing through the gateway adds some latency compared to a call on your own network.

Security & privacy

What does “zero data stored” actually mean?

Your prompt and response content is never written to disk or logs — requests are processed in memory only long enough to route them. What is kept is usage metadata (model name, token counts, latency, status) for billing and your dashboard, as described in the privacy policy.

How is the connection secured?

All traffic is encrypted in transit with TLS 1.2/1.3. The agent connects outbound over an encrypted WebSocket (wss://) and refuses to start with an unencrypted URL; API calls are HTTPS and authenticated with your license key.

Can Mealissa see my prompts?

Prompts pass through the gateway encrypted in transit and are never stored or logged. Only usage metadata — never conversation content — is recorded.

Who owns my models and my data?

You do. Models run on your hardware with your weights; Mealissa handles only the secure exposure.

How are API keys managed?

You create and manage license keys in the cloud console. Every API call authenticates with a key sent as a bearer token; keys can be listed and validated from the console and are revoked when an account closes.

Can access to my node be restricted?

Yes — every request must present a valid license key, and unauthenticated calls are rejected. Finer-grained controls such as IP allowlists are not currently offered.

Architecture & operations

How does Mealissa work?

The mealissa-llm-agent runs next to Ollama on your machine and opens an outbound, encrypted WebSocket to the Mealissa cloud, registering your node and model. Callers send standard Anthropic or OpenAI API requests to your endpoint; the gateway forwards each request over that persistent connection to your agent, which queries Ollama and returns the answer. Nothing is persisted along the way. See how the protocol layer works.

Do I need port forwarding or a static IP?

No. The agent's connection is outbound-only — no port forwarding, no static IP, no router configuration.

How much latency does the gateway add?

One encrypted round trip through the gateway on top of your model's inference time; the exact overhead depends on your distance from the relay. The usage dashboard shows per-request latency so you can measure it for your own setup.

Is the agent open source?

Not currently — the mealissa-llm-agent is distributed as a free download for Windows and Linux.

What happens during agent updates?

Updates are manual today: download the new version from the downloads page, stop the agent, replace it, and start it again. Your node re-registers automatically when the agent reconnects.

Is there monitoring or an audit trail?

Yes — the usage dashboard shows every request with the node that served it, token counts, latency, and your credit balance.

What availability guarantees does Mealissa provide?

There is no formal SLA yet; the service is provided as-is per the Terms of Service. The agent reconnects automatically with exponential backoff if its connection drops.

What happens if my machine goes offline?

Your node stops receiving requests until it reconnects — the agent retries automatically. If you run several nodes in a group, requests to the group endpoint are served by the nodes still online.

Setup & requirements

What do I need to install?

Two things: Ollama and the mealissa-llm-agent (about 440 KB), on Windows 10/11 (x64) or Ubuntu 20.04+/Debian/RHEL (x64). The agent installs a compatible Java runtime automatically if one isn't present. You'll also need a free license key. Full walkthrough: install guide.

Do I need technical knowledge? How long does setup take?

If you can run Ollama, you can run Mealissa. Install Ollama, pull a model, download the agent, add your license key, run it — a few minutes total, with no networking configuration.

Which local inference engines are supported?

Ollama. Any model in the Ollama library works — Llama, Qwen, Gemma, Mistral, Phi, DeepSeek, and more — up to your plan's parameter size.

Compatibility & integrations

Will my existing Anthropic code work?

Yes. Mealissa implements the Anthropic Messages API — point the Claude SDK at your Mealissa endpoint and your local models answer in the format your code expects. See Compatible SDKs.

Which SDKs are supported?

The Anthropic Claude SDK and the OpenAI SDK both work unchanged, in any language; plain HTTPS calls (for example with curl) work too.

Does Mealissa support the OpenAI API format?

Yes. Alongside the Anthropic Messages API, every node and group endpoint also implements the OpenAI Chat Completions API (/v1/chat/completions), including streaming with stream=true.

Can AI coding tools and IDEs connect to Mealissa?

Any tool that lets you set a custom Anthropic- or OpenAI-compatible base URL can point at your Mealissa endpoint. There is no officially certified tool list yet.

Does it support streaming responses?

Yes — request streaming through the OpenAI Chat Completions format with stream=true and tokens arrive as server-sent events. The Anthropic Messages endpoint currently returns complete responses.

Does it support tool or function calling?

Not yet. The API currently handles text conversations; tool calling is under consideration.

Access & scale

Can I reach my local model from anywhere?

Yes — that's the core of the product. Your node gets one stable, globally reachable endpoint, encrypted in transit.

Can multiple users or apps share one local model?

Yes. Any caller with a valid license key can send requests to your endpoint, and every request is authenticated individually.

Can I expose multiple models at once?

Each running agent registers one model per node today. To serve several models, run additional nodes — they can share one group endpoint.

Can I run multiple nodes under one account?

Yes, up to your plan's node count. Nodes are organized into groups, and requests to a group endpoint are distributed automatically across the group's online nodes.

Licensing & pricing

What does the free license include?

The free Pico plan covers models up to 4b parameters, 1 node, 300 messages per month, and community support. There's also a 7-day free trial for models up to 14b — no credit card required. See all licensing plans.

Can I use Mealissa commercially?

Yes. Paid plans are priced by the maximum model parameter size your deployment runs; for larger or custom deployments, contact us.

Still have questions?

Check the install guide or get in touch — we're happy to help.

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