This knowledge leaves with your staff, and it cannot go just anywhere.
A public body holds dense organisational knowledge: deliberations, procedures, decision paths, case history. That knowledge exists, but it lives in office tools and in people's heads, not in a system an AI can reliably consult.
Case memory leaves with the staff
Transfers, retirements, end of contracts: what an officer knows about a case's history, its precedents, its contacts, leaves with them. What remains is scattered across shared drives, mailboxes and archived deliberations.
An AI service hosted outside your control cannot receive it
Pouring this knowledge into a consumer AI assistant, hosted outside the administration's control, is not an option an IT department can sign off on. The hosting question is settled before the usage question.
Your sector buys reversibility
Reversibility and transferability clauses are an explicit contractual object of public IT procurement. A vendor with no structural answer to that requirement discovers it at negotiation, at the worst possible moment.
Kastel's answer is an architecture, not a label: self-host, on infrastructure your administration controls, with a full export available at any time.
How Kastel deploys in your organisation
For a public buyer, Kastel presents itself first as a deployment architecture - and it can be evaluated without any purchase.
Self-hosted, free, no purchase required
Kastel's complete core is free in self-host, with no feature gating, no size cap, no network licence check and no expiry. Your IT department evaluates it on its own infrastructure, without entering a procurement procedure.
Exposed over MCP, to the model of your choice
Once structured, your context connects to the AI you choose through a standard socket - including a model your administration hosts itself, with no outbound call to an inference provider.
Your own keys, your own perimeter
Inference runs on your administration's keys, with the provider you select. Kastel never resells inference and takes no margin on it. And you decide what each AI is allowed to see, department by department.
A managed mode, hosted in France
If your organisation prefers not to operate the instance, Kastel offers managed hosting with Scaleway SAS, fr-par region (France): one isolated instance per client, never a shared engine. For perimeters that require a qualified cloud offering, self-host remains the path.
Under the hood, the content of your Kastel is structured, versioned text: the export is total, at any time, in a format published under Apache-2.0, readable without any Kastel tooling.
The questions of a public consultation, answered head-on
What an IT department, a security officer or a data protection officer asks - in the order the questions actually come.
- 01
“Are you SecNumCloud-qualified?”
No. Kastel does not hold the SecNumCloud qualification (the French state cloud security qualification, issued by ANSSI) and has not started a qualification process. And a precision we prefer to state ourselves: the qualification covers a service, not a company nor the infrastructure hosting it - an offering hosted on a qualified offering is not itself qualified. The path we propose is self-host: your administration deploys Kastel on its own infrastructure, including, if it wishes, on a qualified offering it has contracted itself. The qualification then covers its hosting; it does not cover Kastel.
- 02
“Does the data stay in France?”
In self-host, it stays wherever your administration puts it - that is the point. In managed mode, the instance is hosted with Scaleway SAS, fr-par region (France), isolated per client. In both cases, inference goes to the AI provider you have chosen, on your keys - including a model hosted on your own premises if your perimeter requires it.
- 03
“What about reversibility?”
Full export at any time, content in structured text readable without any Kastel tooling, export format published under the Apache-2.0 licence, standard MCP interface. In self-host, your administration already operates the instance: operational reversibility is acquired by construction. One caveat to know: the engine is proprietary and closed - reversibility covers your data, your context and your infrastructure, never the engine's code.
- 04
“Who owns the data and the deliverables?”
Your administration owns its data, its context and its infrastructure. It does not own the engine. We prefer to state this here rather than let it surface during the intellectual property clause negotiation.
- 05
“Is your interface RGAA-compliant?”
No accessibility audit has been performed and no accessibility statement is published to date. It is an uncomfortable answer, but it is the only honest one - and we know the accessibility obligation rests on your administration, including for its internal tools. We do not claim an audit is under way.
- 06
“What happens if you shut down?”
Your data survives: full export, published format, content readable without us. In self-host, your instance keeps running with no network link to Kastel whatsoever - verifiable by watching the traffic. What does not survive the same way: to date, no escrow deposit has been made and no business continuity plan is written. That is a real weakness, and we state it as such.
- 07
“How do we buy you?”
The free self-host plan deploys without any purchase: that is the evaluation path. Beyond it, the amount of the commitment determines the applicable procedure, as for any public contract. Kastel is not listed on any framework agreement or public purchasing body to date - we prefer to tell you before you look it up.
What you can verify yourself
Each of these properties can be checked on your own instance, by your own teams, without taking our word for it.
No traffic to Kastel by default
In self-host, telemetry is disabled by default and there is no outbound call to any Kastel infrastructure. Verifiable by watching the network, not by reading a promise.
Access control enforced at the database
The access filter is enforced on every read path, including those used by AI agents. A denial is indistinguishable from a resource that does not exist. Access tokens are revocable consumer by consumer.
Sealed audit chain
Every governed action is recorded in it and re-verified on every read. A break in the chain would be disclosed, never masked.
A security file that states its own gaps
A pre-filled security questionnaire that declares what does not exist yet, a hardening guide for the operator, and a signed release manifest, verifiable without any Kastel tooling.
Sovereignty and reversibility
The ownership question, last - after the architectural answer has been heard.
Reversibility by construction
Full export at any time, structured text readable without Kastel tooling, format published under Apache-2.0. The reversibility clause of your contract gets a structural answer, not an exit plan written for the tender.
Standard MCP interface
The protocol AIs connect through is open. Changing AI provider rebuilds nothing: you unplug, you plug back in.
The complete core, free, forever
In self-host, with no feature gating and no size cap. The entity publishing Kastel is Pharos EURL, incorporated in France.
What is not yet true
No escrow deposit has been made: a programme is being put in place. No business continuity plan is written. No RGAA accessibility audit has been performed. No listing on any framework agreement or public purchasing body. These are real weaknesses, not details: we state them as such.
Kastel is not exempt from its own rule: total export at any time, free self-host for life. Proof, not promise.
See Kastel EnterpriseLet's build your fortress.
The complete core is free in self-host, with no purchase required. If your administration wants support to evaluate or deploy it, let's talk.
Prefer to be guided? Our partner integrators can take it from here.