Refine

An unintrusive, self-hosted text refinement tool. Select text anywhere — on your desktop or on Android — press Refine, and your text is rewritten by an LLM of your choice, in a tone of your choice, using your own API keys on your own server.

No subscriptions. No shared infrastructure. You control the models, the tones, and the keys.

The pieces:

• API — Hono server (Bun) that holds your provider credentials and handles refinements
• Admin panel — React SPA for managing providers, devices, and pairing tokens
• Desktop app — Windows/macOS/Linux (Electron). A global shortcut refines selected text in place, with a system tray for quick model/tone switching and a full window UI
• Mobile app — Android. Dedicated input surface plus a system context-menu action for refining selected text in-place

The server ships as a container image on GHCR (ghcr.io/kyng-cytro/refine); desktop installers and the Android APK are attached to each GitHub release.

→ Self-Hosting Guide

---

Screenshots

Desktop app

Home	Settings	Pairing

Mobile app (Android)

Home	Settings	Pairing

Admin panel

Providers	Devices
Tones	History

---

Monorepo

refine/
├── apps/
│   ├── api/        Hono HTTP API (Bun runtime)
│   ├── admin/      React SPA — provider & device management
│   ├── desktop/    Electron desktop app (Windows/macOS/Linux)
│   └── mobile/     Expo React Native app (Android only)
├── packages/
│   ├── db/         Drizzle ORM schema, migrations, seed
│   ├── models/     Provider/model catalog + icons
│   ├── schemas/    Zod types shared across API, admin, SDK, apps
│   └── sdk/        Typed API client used by mobile and desktop

Tooling: Bun, Turbo, TypeScript.

---

Local development

bun install
bun run db:migrate && bun run db:seed
bun run dev

Copy apps/api/.env.example to apps/api/.env before running.

Command	What it does
bun run dev	API + admin dev servers
bun run api:dev	API only
bun run admin:dev	Admin only
bun run admin:build	Production build (outputs to apps/api/public/admin/)
bun run type-check	TypeScript across all packages
bun run db:generate	Generate migration SQL from schema changes
bun run db:migrate	Run pending migrations
bun run db:seed	Seed default data
bun run desktop:dev	Electron desktop app in dev
bun run desktop:dist	Build desktop installers for the current OS
bun run mobile:android	Build and run Android app
bun run mobile:prebuild	Expo prebuild (generates native android/)
bun changeset	Add a changeset (run in every PR that changes a package)

---

Adding a provider

All provider definitions live in packages/models/src/. Admin and mobile consume them directly — three files to touch.

1. Type — packages/models/src/types.ts

export type ModelProvider = "openrouter" | "openai" | "anthropic" | "google" | "yourprovider"

2. Icon — packages/models/src/icons/index.ts

Icons come from simple-icons. Add the import and export it:

import { siYourprovider } from "simple-icons"

export const icons = {
  yourprovider: fromSi(siYourprovider),
}

If the provider isn't in simple-icons, inline the SVG as a string with fill="currentColor".

3. Provider entry — packages/models/src/index.ts

bun add @ai-sdk/yourprovider --cwd packages/models

import { createYourProvider } from "@ai-sdk/yourprovider"

{
  id: "yourprovider",
  label: "Your Provider",
  description: "Short description shown in the admin panel",
  placeholder: "key-prefix…",
  docs: "https://yourprovider.com/api-keys",
  icon: icons.yourprovider,
  create: (apiKey) => createYourProvider({ apiKey }),
  models: [
    {
      id: "yourmodel-v1",
      label: "Your Model v1",
      icon: icons.yourprovider,
      cost: { input: 2.5, output: 10 },
    },
  ],
},

cost is the model's list price in USD per 1M tokens, used for the admin usage cost estimates. Use { input: 0, output: 0 } for free models, or omit it when pricing is unknown (e.g. auto-routed models).