
headroom
The Context Optimization Layer for LLM Applications
The Lens
headroom strips boilerplate from everything an LLM agent reads (tool outputs, logs, RAG chunks, file dumps) before the content hits the prompt. The reported numbers are real: 87% fewer tokens on a 100-log needle-in-haystack test, 92% on code search results, with accuracy unchanged on GSM8K and TruthfulQA. Apache 2.0, runs entirely on your machine.
Setup is one command. `headroom wrap claude` or `headroom wrap codex` puts it in front of the API call. There is also a Python and TypeScript SDK for direct `compress(messages)` use, plus a proxy mode for everything else. Local-first design means no data egress, and compression latency is milliseconds, not a network hop.
If you are paying for Claude, GPT, or Sonnet at scale, this pays for itself fast. Token costs drop directly. The hosted dashboard at headroomlabs.ai is a community leaderboard, not gated functionality. Solo developers running coding agents heavily: install it. Teams burning through enterprise LLM budgets: pilot on one team first.
The catch: aggressive compression on novel content can lose nuance the model needed. The reversible design lets the model pull original bytes back via tool call, but that only works if the agent is configured to use it. Verify on your real workload before trusting blanket compression.
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Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully free**Free tier:** Apache 2.0 OSS package on PyPI and npm. Includes the full compression pipeline (CacheAligner, ContentRouter, SmartCrusher, CodeCompressor) and the open-source Kompress-base model on HuggingFace. Wraps Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Aider, and Copilot CLI out of the box. No usage caps.
**Self-hosted:** This is the default mode. Everything runs locally. Install with `pip install "headroom-ai[all]"` or `npm install headroom-ai`. The HuggingFace model adds ~1 GB on disk for the ML compressor.
**Paid tier:** None publicly priced. Headroom Labs (the company) operates a community dashboard at headroomlabs.ai for shared leaderboard stats. Enterprise offerings may exist but are not advertised.
Free and open source. The hosted dashboard at headroomlabs.ai is a community leaderboard, not gated functionality.
License: Apache License 2.0
Use freely. Patent grant included.
Commercial use: ✓ Yes
About
- Owner
- Tejas Chopra (User)
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