Uruky is a two person project that runs its own web crawler and tags itself NO AI; adding the privacy focused cryptocurrency Monero would let it bill users outside the mainstream card rails.
A small EU-based privacy search project has crossed roughly 100 active users, exited image search beta this month, and is now debating whether to accept a cryptocurrency that mainstream payment processors decline. The project is Uruky, a two-person effort run by BrunoBernardino and his wife, and the tradeoffs at this scale are now on the table.
In an Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026) thread, co-founder BrunoBernardino listed a series of small but concrete milestones: the team runs its own web crawler, image search exited beta this month, and the user base has reached roughly 100 active accounts. The thread, posted by user david927 on June 14, accumulated 16 points and 18 comments before Type0 looked at it.
The Uruky pitch is closer to Kagi than to Google. The founders frame it as a deliberately smaller, EU-based alternative, with a [NO-AI] tag signaling that the results page is meant to be free of generative summaries. That stance shapes every downstream choice: a self-hosted crawler is the only way to avoid the large indexes that come with AI-shaped retrieval, and the founders have leaned into the cost.
The next decision is payment. Uruky currently does not sell access, and the founders have told the HN thread they want a way to accept Monero, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that mainstream payment processors routinely decline. The move would let the project bill users who cannot or will not use card rails, and would also test whether the [NO-AI] stance travels to the payment rail.
The tradeoffs at this size are also the story. Running your own crawler at 100-user scale means a small index, uneven freshness, and an unsolved discovery problem. None of that is hidden; the project does not pretend to be a Google replacement. What it does offer is a working answer to a specific set of privacy and infrastructure choices that a large search incumbent would never make.
Watch items: whether Monero integration actually ships, and whether the [NO-AI] stance survives the next round of crawler work.