Local-first software keeps the authoritative copy of your data on your own device rather than a company's server. It may still use the network — to sync, or for a processing step — but the copy on your machine is the real one, and it keeps working when the service does not.
If the company behind the software shut down tomorrow, would your data still be there, and still usable? A cloud application fails that test. The server holds the only complete copy, and what runs on your machine is a window onto it. Local-first passes, because the file on your disk is the original, not a cache of it.
Encryption and a privacy policy describe how carefully someone else handles a copy they hold. Local-first changes who holds it. An account lockout cannot separate you from your own files, and leaving does not turn into a migration project.
Real-time collaboration between many people is harder without a central server to arbitrate. Backup becomes your job. And work that needs serious computation may still have to leave the device to get it: local-first describes where the durable copy lives, not a promise that nothing ever touches a network.
Every recording is written to your Mac first, in full, on every tier including the free one. The cloud handles speech recognition and extraction — the transcript goes up, the structured result comes back, and nothing is kept on our servers afterwards. Your local disk holds the only permanent copy.
The searchable memory built from those meetings is an index on your disk, not a database in our cloud. A read-only Model Context Protocol server bound to localhost is the only way in, so agents on your own machine can query it and cloud services cannot reach it at all. Cancelling changes none of this.
No. Your audio never leaves your Mac, but the transcript does, briefly — recognition and extraction run on enterprise services that keep no copy afterwards and exclude that text from model training. The distinction worth holding onto is between data passing through a processing step and data living on someone else's server. Any tool that does speech recognition and claims nothing leaves your device deserves a closer look.
They overlap but are not the same. Self-hosting means you run the server software yourself, usually on hardware you administer — the architecture is still client and server, you have simply taken on the server. Local-first removes the requirement for that server to exist at all before your data is readable. Self-hosting is an operational choice; local-first is a design decision about where the authoritative copy lives.
Nothing changes locally. The recordings and the memory index already live on your device rather than in our cloud, so cancelling cannot take them away. Any file processed in the cloud is deleted from our servers right afterwards, and your account information is erased when you cancel.