How Efani Cut AI Costs by 70% While Maintaining Privacy with Okara

About Efani

Efani is a security-first mobile SIM provider built for users who care deeply about privacy, identity protection, and data sovereignty. As a company operating in a highly sensitive domain, Efani applies strict privacy standards not just to its product, but also to its internal tools and workflows.

When AI tools became critical for research, writing, and marketing workflows, Efani faced a hard constraint:

“We could not use closed AI platforms that train on user data or use/monitor sensitive information that is critical for our business function and data privacy.” – Haseeb Awan, Founder, Efani

The Challenge: Using AI Without Compromising Privacy

As a privacy-focused SIM card provider, Efani handles sensitive user, market, and infrastructure information every day. Their teams needed AI to:

• Conduct market and competitor research
• Analyze documents and internal PDFs
• Write marketing copy and ad creatives
• Debug and review code from engineering teams
• Collaborate across geographies securely

However, most popular AI tools posed serious risks.

“We couldn’t justify using closed AI platforms that might store, reuse, or train on our data. That would go against everything we stand for as a privacy company.”

Key Problems Efani Faced

• Data leakage risk with closed AI providers
• Lack of transparency on where data is stored or used
• Compliance concerns when sharing internal documents
• High costs for advanced models
• Multiple subscriptions to access different AI models that excel at different skills
• Fragmented tools for research, writing, and collaboration

Efani needed an AI solution that matched their privacy posture, not one that undermined it. At the same time, they needed an AI solution that provides them options and doesn’t lock them into a product that doesn’t enhance itself at the pace of development in AI space.

The Solution: Okara, A Private, Encrypted AI Chat

Efani switched to Okara, a privacy-first AI chat built on open-source models, to power research, writing, ads, and collaboration without compromising data security or compliance.

“Okara’s encrypted AI chat and use of open-source models meant we could maintain privacy and compliance while still using state-of-the-art open-source AI models.”

Why Okara Specifically?

Efani evaluated multiple options, but Okara stood out because it offered:

• Open-source AI models (no opaque training pipelines)
• Encrypted workspaces with passcode-based access
• No data sharing with model providers
• Clear data sovereignty guarantees
• A single workspace for research, writing, and collaboration

Okara allowed Efani to adopt AI across teams, without introducing privacy debt.

How Efani Team Uses Okara Day-to-Day

1. Marketing & Growth: Campaign Copy and Ads

The growth team uses Okara daily to:

• Draft ad copy and landing page variants
• Write email campaigns and announcements
• Brainstorm messaging angles for privacy-conscious users

Models Used: DeepSeek, Kimi

Outcome: Faster experimentation with messaging without exposing strategy or customer insights.

“We can generate and iterate on campaign copy quickly without worrying about where that data goes.”  — Efani Growth Team

2. Research & Analysis: PDFs, Market Data, and Web Search

Product and strategy teams use Okara to:

• Analyzing long PDFs and internal documents
• Conducting competitor and market research
• Cross-referencing information using built-in web search

Tools Used: File analysis, web search integration, Reddit search 

Outcome: Deep research completed in minutes instead of hours.

“What used to take us 8 hours of reading and summarizing now takes about 15 minutes.”

3. Secure Collaboration Across Teams & Countries

Efani team operates across multiple geographies. Okara’s workspace collaboration allows:

• Shared AI conversations for brainstorming
• Secure collaboration across 3 countries
• Centralized knowledge without Slack or email sprawl

Teams Using Shared Workspaces: Growth, Product, Strategy

Outcome: Faster alignment without leaking sensitive discussions.

Results

Since switching to Okara, Efani has seen measurable improvements:

1. 70% reduction in AI subscription cost compared to closed AI platforms
2. 6 hours came down to 15 mins for document analysis, market research 
3. Secure AI collaboration across teams
4. Access to 30+ open-source AI models, that team members can use as per their liking and requirements.

AreaImpactPrivacy & ComplianceMaintained full data controlCost Efficiency70% reduction in AI spendResearch Speed8× faster document analysisCollaborationSecure, cross-team collaboration and brainstormingProductivityFewer tools, faster output