Frequently asked questions
The business model, the showcase, the models, and how SimpleDirect is built. Plain answers.
Is SimpleDirect a SaaS company?
No. We ship open-source models (Apache 2.0), a free showcase API for evaluation, and a licensed cloud-deploy package buyers run in their own infrastructure. The future on-prem appliance is a product purchase. None of these is a vendor-hosted subscription service.
Do you offer an API?
We'll offer free inference via chat.getsimpledirect.com (free signup, generous quotas) for evaluation — launching September 30, 2026. We don't run a paid API tier as our primary business. If the free showcase sees real demand for pay-as-you-go higher quotas, we may offer that — but that decision is deferred until we see it.
How does SimpleDirect make money?
Licensed cloud-deploy packages for production buyers; a small number of selective inbound engagements with federal, enterprise, and legal buyers (two to three per year); future on-prem appliance sales; and George's writing and speaking. We don't sell user data. We don't run ads.
Can I download flash-1-mini and use it commercially?
Yes. flash-1-mini is released under Apache 2.0, which permits commercial use. Download it from Hugging Face. If you fine-tune it on your data, the resulting model is yours.
Is my data safe on chat.getsimpledirect.com?
We publish a plain-language data transparency disclosure at /data explaining exactly what is and isn't stored, what we do and don't do with your queries, and what the showcase is and isn't suitable for. We trust you to read it and make your own call.
How does SimpleDirect differ from Cohere?
Cohere builds frontier general models, primarily commercial-API access, primarily English-first. SimpleDirect builds specialized Canadian Business + Legal + Regulatory models, open weights under Apache 2.0, bilingual from the ground up, for buyers who need to own and self-deploy. Different products, different audiences. Both are Canadian AI companies and we wish them well.
How does SimpleDirect differ from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google?
We build specialized open Canadian Business + Legal + Regulatory AI. They build general-purpose frontier AI. Different goals, different products. The flash series won't outperform GPT-5 on creative writing; it will outperform on Canadian case-law citation accuracy. The buyer chooses based on use case.
When will flash-1 ship?
September 30, 2026 — the same day as the free showcase API.
When will flash-1-pro ship?
March 31, 2027.
What is CBLRE?
The Canadian Bilingual Legal and Regulatory Evaluation — a public benchmark for how well AI models perform on Canadian legal and regulatory reasoning, in English and Canadian French. Vendor-neutral, designed to be citable in procurement RFPs. Six tracks, 129 expert-reviewed items. Published and available.
Is SimpleDirect Canadian?
SimpleDirect® is a registered trademark of Alpine Pacific Trading Inc., a Canadian company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario. Models are trained on Canadian sovereign AI infrastructure in Rimouski, Quebec, and governed by Canadian law.
Who are SimpleDirect's customers?
Canadian (and increasingly North American) buyers with proprietary expertise and confidential work product who can't use general-purpose vendor-hosted AI for their most valuable work: federal and provincial government departments, Big Law firms, in-house counsel, compliance teams at regulated enterprises, and professional-services firms. Anyone who needs to own their AI rather than rent it.
Why don't you build a chatbot product?
We're shipping one — chat.getsimpledirect.com — as a free showcase to let people try the models. It's not the business. The business is open weights plus the licensed cloud-deploy package. The showcase exists because most buyers can't deploy from Hugging Face.
Can I self-host SimpleDirect models in my own data centre?
Yes — that's the design. Download the weights and run them on your infrastructure. For a production deployment with packaging and updates, the cloud-deploy license bundles the models, RAG infrastructure, and a forked Open WebUI.
Do you accept venture capital?
No, and we don't plan to. No venture capital, no LPs, no fund. We keep the company small and fund it from our own work.
Is SimpleDirect a consulting firm?
No. We ship software. We take two to three scoped technical engagements a year, inbound only, for specific high-value buyers — but that's a small part of the work, not a consulting practice. George writes about AI ownership separately.
What does "AI you can own" mean?
You hold the model weights. They run on your hardware or in your own cloud. No vendor can revoke, reprice, throttle, or deprecate them. Your data stays where you put it. That's ownership, not access.