About

Hi, I'm Manoj. I built Arco.

Why I built this

Here's the thing: no single model is best at everything. One is great at code. Another nails writing. Another is better when you need to think through something tricky. So if you actually care about getting a good answer, you end up asking the same question to a few different models and seeing what comes back.

I was doing that constantly. Open a tab, paste the prompt, wait. Open another tab, paste again, wait again. Copy, compare, repeat. It got old fast.

And even after all that, the work wasn't done. I'd still have to read through every response, line by line, and figure out the answer myself. Where did they agree? Where did they disagree? Which one was actually worth going with? That part took just as much time, and I was doing all the summarizing in my head.

I wanted one place to ask once and see every answer next to each other. That's Arco. Pick your models, send one prompt, and compare what you get. When you're ready to decide, Summarize does the heavy lifting. It pulls the responses together and shows you where models agree, where they don't, and what stands out. You still make the call, but you're not starting from scratch.

Pay for what you use

I'm not a daily power user. Most weeks I'd use a comparison tool maybe two or three times. Sometimes more if I had something important to figure out, sometimes less. But I was still paying the same fixed monthly fee every month, whether I used it or not. That never felt right to me.

I wanted something where the cost matched how much I actually used it. Not a flat subscription just to keep access.

That's how Arco is set up. You buy Pro once if you want the full version. For model usage, you bring your own OpenRouter key and pay OpenRouter directly for the tokens you use. Use it a lot one week, pay a bit more. Barely touch it the next, you barely pay. Simple as that.

Privacy

I also didn't love the idea of my conversations sitting on someone else's server. I wanted everything on my machine, under my control.

With Arco, your chats stay on your Mac. Your OpenRouter key stays with you too. We're not in the middle of any of it.

Who it's for

If you compare models from time to time, want your stuff to stay private, and don't like paying a fixed monthly fee for something you only use occasionally, this is for you. I built it because I needed it myself.

Questions or feedback? Email me at [email protected].