Open WebUI: what the slim image leaves out and where your chat goes

Open WebUI is a self-hosted chat interface. It has no models of its own: you connect it to Ollama on your machine, your own model server or a cloud API. The v0.11.4 release added a slim image that the release notes put at around 175 MB, near enough 89% smaller than the last release, because the local models, their packages and the tools that installed them were taken out.

This guide covers the three things I would check before setting it up: what the slim image leaves out, where your chat actually goes, and the branding rules in the license. I read the official release notes, docs and license for this; I have not run these steps myself, so treat them as a checklist, not a benchmark.