// the find
zaidmukaddam/scira
Scira (Formerly MiniPerplx) is a minimalistic AI-powered search engine that helps you find information on the internet and cites it too. Powered by Vercel AI SDK!
Scira is an open-source AI search engine built on Next.js and Vercel AI SDK that routes queries through 17 specialized modes (web, academic, X, stocks, crypto, etc.) and returns cited answers. It's for developers who want a self-hosted Perplexity alternative or a reference implementation of agentic search with streaming UI.
The multi-provider LLM support is genuinely broad — xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, DeepSeek, and a dozen others all wired through Vercel AI SDK, so swapping models is trivial. The tool catalog (28 tools) is unusually complete for an OSS project: flight tracking, prediction markets, code execution via Daytona sandbox, and semantic file search are things most similar repos skip. AGPL-3.0 with Docker Compose support means self-hosting is actually a documented first-class path, not an afterthought. The 'Lookouts' feature — recurring research agents that email updates — is a genuinely useful product concept beyond basic chat search.
Self-hosting requires wiring up 30+ API keys across Exa, Firecrawl, Parallel, Tavily, Valyu, Supadata, CoinGecko, OpenWeatherMap, Google Maps, TMDB, Cohere, Supermemory, Daytona, ElevenLabs, Upstash, Cloudflare R2, and more — without all of them the mode selector silently degrades and you won't know what's broken until you try it. The dependency surface is a liability: any of those vendors changing terms, pricing, or going down takes a feature with it, and the project has no abstraction layer around them. The component tree is massive (200+ files under components/) with essentially no tests visible in the repo structure, so contributing or forking carries real risk of breaking something non-obvious. Pro features (Memory, Voice, Connectors, XQL) gate the most interesting pieces behind a paywall on the hosted version, meaning the OSS repo you're running locally is missing capabilities the README prominently advertises.