Built for real conversations.
Prelay is an AI conversation platform with no feed and no algorithm deciding what you see — just you and the assistant.
Our story
Prelay Labs Inc. was founded in 2025 by Ethan Caldwell, who set out to build an AI assistant platform without the noise of a social feed. The idea was simple: conversations that stay private, and an interface that gets out of the way.
The Prelay AI platform launched in 2026. As part of standing up the infrastructure, the team migrated data from a few older web projects, including some account records from an independent forum that had shut down years earlier. That legacy data is not part of the product experience.
Team
Started Prelay Labs in 2025 to build a calmer, more private way to talk to AI.
Leads the platform and infrastructure behind Prelay's conversational engine.
Builds and maintains the systems that power Prelay's chat experience.
Shapes the look and feel of the Prelay interface, from the chat window to the onboarding flow.
Keeps Prelay's servers and data pipelines running, including the systems set up during the 2026 migration.
Worked in community operations on the old Offtopic-Day forum before it shut down, and was later brought onto the Prelay team in a support role.
What people say
"The storage settings are what sold me — I can pick DB, local-only, or nothing at all, per account. No other assistant I've tried lets you actually choose that."
"No feed, no 'recommended for you', no ads slipped into answers. It just answers the question and gets out of the way."
"Switched from a bigger provider mostly for the privacy controls. Being able to turn off server-side history entirely, not just 'pause' it, actually matters."