In his weekly AI news video of 23 October 2026, Matt Wolfe walked through a hard week for security. One story stood out for anyone who builds small apps: a hosting platform reported that an unauthorized party may have accessed environment variables, and for many apps those are API keys. His question was a fair one: if it happened there, who is to say it cannot happen to the next platform your app runs on?
We do not think any setup is breach-proof. But the incident made us write down what we keep learning while building cyantula.
The real problem: keys live inside every app
A team that builds internal tools with AI ends up with many small apps. Each one needs a model, email, Slack or a CRM, so each one carries its own keys in its own environment variables, often on a platform outside the company. When one platform has a bad day, every one of those keys is suddenly a question, and somebody has to find and rotate them app by app. And a leaked model key costs real money, because someone else's usage lands on your bill.
Lesson one: run the platform where your data already lives
cyantula runs on your own infrastructure by default. It installs with one command on a Debian or Ubuntu machine with Docker, or on a Proxmox host, and the free plan runs on your own server. The licence is checked on that server too, so it works without an internet connection. Your internal apps and their data stay inside your own environment instead of sharing a host with thousands of other companies. Prefer not to run a server? Kobozo can host it for you, and you choose.
Lesson two: keep keys out of the apps
In cyantula the app owner ticks which integrations an app needs, and the platform holds every credential. The app never sees a key. It can send email from your domain and Slack messages without an API key in the app, and call an LLM with a daily budget per app. So keys are not scattered over fifty environment variables, and one runaway app cannot run up an open-ended bill.
Lesson three: one login in front of everything
Every app sits behind your existing company login. The app never implements login itself, and the owner decides who can open it.
What it does not do
Running on your own server moves responsibility to you: patching the machine, backups of the host, who has root. cyantula updates itself from signed releases, but your server is still yours to look after. We think that trade is worth it for internal tools. You may decide differently, and that is fine.
Try it
Read the install guide (/docs/install/), see the plans (/pricing/), or ask for a demo account on https://demo.cyantula.app by emailing yannick@kobozo.eu. We are learning in public, so tell us where this reasoning breaks.