Providers & models

When to read this: You want to connect an LLM provider, add models to the roster, pick a default, or work out why a model is missing.

Everything lives on one page: Settings → Models & Providers. The roster lists every model as a row — favourite star, provider, context window, input price per million tokens and temperature — with a status chip per provider across the top. Changes save automatically.

Connect a provider

Click Manage keys. One sheet holds all three providers; each row shows its status and has Save and Test buttons. Keys are stored with your app settings, never in your project files. Removing a key hides that provider’s models but keeps their settings.

OpenRouter

One key gives access to many upstream models (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Mistral and more). Paste the key (it starts with sk-or-), Save, then Test — a good key shows Key verified and the chip reads Connected · N models. Chatty also pulls the OpenRouter catalogue, including pricing, so the roster’s price column fills itself.

Ollama

No key needed — a local instance is detected automatically. The URL field defaults to http://localhost:11434; change it and Save if Ollama runs elsewhere (another machine, a different port). Test shows Running · N models.

Note

Plain http:// is only for your own network. Provider URLs (and MCP server, remote agent and Hive registry URLs) may use http:// only for localhost/loopback and private-LAN addresses (10.x.x.x, 172.16–31.x.x, 192.168.x.x — for example a model server on the Docker bridge, http://172.17.0.1:8000). Any other host must use https://; there is no override.

Ollama models are added for you: Chatty discovers what is installed shortly after launch and keeps the roster in step, removing models you have deleted from Ollama and detecting per model whether it accepts images.

Note

A pulled model does not show up? Discovery runs at launch, and again every time the Settings window opens or is brought forward — so an Ollama started after Chatty, or a model you ollama pulled while Chatty was open, appears next time you open Settings. No restart needed. If Test fails, make sure Ollama is running (ollama list in a terminal) and that the URL matches where it listens. Models you added by hand under Enter an identifier manually are left alone by discovery.

Azure OpenAI

Azure serves your own deployments rather than a public catalogue, so it needs three things:

1. API key, or switch on Use Entra ID instead of a key to sign in with your Azure account.
2. Endpoint URL — your resource address, e.g. https://my-resource.openai.azure.com. The v1 base URL (https://my-resource.openai.azure.com/openai/v1/) and the deployment or Responses URLs the Azure portal shows work too.
3. Deployment name — the deployment you created in Azure, e.g. gpt-5-chat.

Press Connect & fetch models. Each further deployment is added by name in the Add model sheet.

When a request carries tools (an agent turn), chatty sends it to the resource’s Responses API, the one OpenAI’s reasoning models accept tools on. A plain chat without tools, such as a title or a summary, goes to the deployment’s chat completions, so an older deployment without the Responses API still chats. The API version under Edit… → Advanced applies to those chat completions. A model-inference endpoint (…services.ai.azure.com/models) serves chat completions only: chatty uses it for everything, and a reasoning model with tools there asks you to switch to the resource’s v1 base URL.

Add a model

Click Add model. The sheet opens on the provider’s catalogue: search it, tick as many models as you like, and add them in one go — no identifiers to type. Models already in your roster show as added. If the OpenRouter catalogue is empty, add a key in Manage keys first and reopen the sheet.

For anything the catalogue does not list, expand Enter an identifier manually and give it a display name and the provider’s model identifier (for example qwen2.5:0.5b).

Favourites, default and per-model settings

• Click a row’s star to pin the model to the top; the Favourites and Local chips filter the roster.
• A row’s ⋯ menu offers Set as default (the model new conversations start with), Edit… and Remove.
• Edit… has a Basic tab (name, identifier, temperature, system prompt) and an Advanced tab: max tokens, Max Context Window (turns on the context fill bar in the chat footer), top-p, cost per million input and output tokens, and the Azure API version.

Favourites and the default survive catalogue syncs and restarts.

Capabilities

Chatty records three capabilities per model and uses them to show or hide the attachment buttons and the temperature control:

Starting values by provider: OpenRouter models accept images and PDFs; Azure OpenAI models accept images but not PDFs; Ollama models are detected one by one, so a vision model gets the image button and a text-only model does not.

Next

• Getting started
• Chatting
• Advanced