I Built a Free Open-Source Hotel AI (By Accident)

Hotels pay $200-2,000/month for chatbot SaaS that locks in their data and charges per message. I built a free, self-hosted alternative. Jack The Butler is an open-source AI concierge that handles guest communication across WhatsApp, SMS, email, and web chat. Hotels deploy it on their own infrastructure — one Docker container, one SQLite file, zero vendor lock-in. Why I built this I've been building hospitality tech for over a decade. My first company, Goki, is a smart lock solution now in over 100 cities worldwide that disrupted how hotels handle access control. Through that experience I talked to hundreds of hotel operators and kept seeing the same problem: they want automated guest messaging, but every solution on the market is a $500+/month SaaS with per-message fees and mandatory cloud hosting. A 50-room boutique hotel shouldn't need to spend $6,000/year just to auto-reply "checkout is at 11am" on WhatsApp. So I built Jack — a single container that does what those platforms do, but