How to use Clarchy
From a brief to a design you can review, price and share, in six steps. Each one matches what you see on screen.
1Write the brief
Describe the app in a few plain sentences, or attach a Word, PDF, Excel, Markdown or text file of up to 10 MB. Tables are read as well as paragraphs. Each fact below changes the design; anything you leave out becomes an assumption or a question you can answer later.
Example brief
An assistant that answers employees' questions from our HR policy documents, for about 8,000 employees in Germany. Employees sign in with SSO. It needs 99.9% uptime, GDPR applies, and chat history must be kept for 2 years. The budget is $4,000 a month, and our 6 developers already use GitHub Copilot.
Clarchy picks out 8,000 users · Frankfurt region · 99.9% availability · GDPR · records kept 2 years · $4,000 a month · 6 developers
| Say | For example | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| How many people use it | about 8,000 employees 120,000 patients | Sizes every service. Below 50,000 users the API runs as serverless functions, above that on containers. Without a number, Clarchy plans for 10,000. |
| The busiest moments | 300 requests per second 2,000 orders an hour | Sizes the API and the database for the peak. |
| How much data | 2 TB of documents grows 50 GB a month | Sizes storage and its cost. |
| Uptime | 99.95% uptime 24/7 | At 99.9% or more, services and databases are spread across zones. Without a number, Clarchy assumes 99.9%. |
| Where users are | users in Germany most customers are in India | Picks the region on every cloud, and the data-protection laws that apply, such as GDPR or India's DPDP Act. |
| Rules that apply | HIPAA applies PCI DSS SOX | Adds audit logging, key management and access control, and checks each rule on the Policies tab. Clarchy knows HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, SOX, SOC 2, ISO 27001 and FedRAMP. |
| How long to keep records | keep records for 7 years | Adds backups, and archive storage for the retention period. |
| Budget | $4,000 a month $50,000 a year | Saved with the design, so you can hold the estimate against it. |
| What you already run | the backend is already in Docker we run Kubernetes | Keeps it: Docker means containers, Kubernetes means Kubernetes. |
| Your team and tools | 6 developers GitHub Copilot Codespaces | Adds the developer tools you name, priced per developer. |
| AI features | an assistant that answers from our policy documents LangGraph agents Langfuse LiteLLM | Adds a model, document search, agent orchestration, an LLM gateway, tracing and guardrails, as the brief needs. |
2Plan it
- On Plan, type or paste the brief, or click Attach. You can also drop a file on the box.
- Region: leave From the text to use the place your brief names, or choose one.
- Planner: the rule-based planner is instant and keeps everything in your browser. To have an AI model write the design, see Use an AI model.
- Click Design architecture, or press Ctrl+Enter. The first plan downloads the planning engine, about 15 MB; after that, plans take seconds.
- Six steps run: read, understand, design, add build and deploy, describe the workflows and map to every cloud. Show steps lists what was found at each one.
TipNo brief yet? A sample, under the box, replays a recorded run of the rule-based planner.
3Read the drawing
- Pick a cloud with the tabs above the drawing: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or Open source. It is the same design, drawn in each cloud's own style.
- Click any service to see why it is there: the sentence of your brief that asked for it, how it connects, its sizing, its monthly cost and the alternatives.
- Actual size shows the drawing at full scale. Esc closes the details.
- The title block under the drawing lists the cloud, the region and the number of services.
4Check cost, policies and workflows
The tabs next to the cloud names show the rest of the design.
- Services
- Every part of the design with the service it uses on this cloud, grouped by stage, and why it is there.
- Cost
- The monthly estimate, and totals for 1 month, 6 months, 1 year and 3 years, on demand and with commitments. AWS and Azure prices come from their official price APIs and are refreshed daily; Google Cloud and third-party prices are marked approximate.
- Policies
- The AI and data rules that apply, such as the EU AI Act, GDPR or HIPAA. Each obligation is covered by a component, a gap with a suggestion, or an action for your team. A checklist for design reviews, not legal advice.
- Workflows
- Numbered paths through the drawing: a user's request, a release, a background job. Press Play to walk through one step by step.
- Spec
- The YAML behind the drawing. Edit it and the drawing, services and costs update as you type; Reset brings back the plan.
5Answer questions and re-plan
- The bar above the drawing lists the questions your brief left open and the assumptions Clarchy made instead.
- Click Answer and re-plan. Answer in your own words, such as
50k
,yes
orFrankfurt
, or correct an assumption. - Clarchy plans again with your answers. Answered questions are not asked again, and each round keeps the answers you gave before.
AUse an AI model
- In Planner, choose Open-source model (Hugging Face).
- Paste a Hugging Face token that may make calls to Inference Providers (create one free ↗), and keep or change the model.
- For a model on your own machine, open Use another endpoint: run Ollama with
OLLAMA_ORIGINS=*, enterhttp://localhost:11434/v1and a model such asqwen2.5:7b, and leave the token empty. - To use Claude, or the agent with other MCP servers, run Clarchy on your own machine with
clarchy serve; the README on GitHub shows how.
PrivacyThe token goes from your browser straight to the model provider and is forgotten when you close the tab. With the rule-based planner, nothing leaves your browser.