My experience building a Self-Hosted AI Chatbot with Flask, Claude, and Cloudflare Tunnels

BhorvicBot – A Raspberry Pi-Powered Claude Chatbot

Since I discovered you could leverage Anthropic’s API to make an AI chatbot, I wanted to construct one that was more than just a wrapper around an API call. I wanted something with personality, hosted on my own hardware, and deployed publicly. The result is BhorvicBot — a Flask-based chatbot running on a Raspberry Pi 5, powered by Anthropic’s Claude API, and accessible at bhorvicbot.com.

The Stack

• 🖥️ Hardware: Raspberry Pi 5 — compact, low power, and more than capable of handling a Flask web server
• 🐍 Backend: Python + Flask, handling API calls to Anthropic’s Claude and serving the chat interface
• 🎨 Frontend: A custom dark-themed UI with AJAX-based messaging for a smooth, no-refresh chat experience
• ☁️ Tunneling: Cloudflare Tunnels expose the Pi to the public internet without needing to open ports or manage a static IP
• 🎲 Personality: The bot runs with a Dungeon Crawler Carl-inspired persona — if you’ve read the series, you’ll feel right at home. The source code is linked below and you can feel free to update the system prompt as you wish.

Why Raspberry Pi?

I already had the hardware, and there’s something satisfying about a publicly accessible web app running on a device sitting on your desk. It also made the project more interesting from a constraints standpoint — keeping the app lightweight and efficient mattered.

What I Learned

The most interesting challenges were around session management, preventing duplicate messages with AJAX, and securing the API key so it wasn’t exposed on the client side. Cloudflare Tunnels turned out to be an elegant solution for public access without the usual networking headaches.