# Local-first software: why your company's data belongs on your machine Source: https://lodos.md/en/blog/local-first-software-own-your-data Published: 2026-06-15 · Author: Samet Samyeli · Language: en · Reading time: 3 min The cloud became the default home for everything you own. Local-first flips that back: your data lives on your device, works offline, and answers only to you. --- At some point, "the cloud" stopped being a feature and became the default. Your notes, your tasks, your customer records, your passwords: all of it now lives on someone else's computer, reachable only as long as you keep paying and they keep running. **Local-first software** is the quiet correction to that. The idea is simple: your data lives on your device first. The network is an enhancement, never a dependency. You can lose your connection, cancel your subscription, or fly across an ocean, and your work keeps working. ## What local-first actually buys you It's easy to treat local-first as a privacy slogan. It's more concrete than that. When your data lives on your machine first, you get: - **Speed.** No round-trip to a server for every keystroke or search. The app responds at the speed of your hardware. - **Offline by default.** Planes, trains, dead Wi-Fi: none of it stops you. The full app is in front of you. - **Real ownership.** No account to download, no export wizard to beg for your own data back, no vendor that can lock you out. - **Privacy that isn't a setting.** If the data never leaves, there's nothing to leak, sell, or train on. The trade people assume you have to make, *local means I lose sync and backup*, turns out to be false. You can keep the convenience of the cloud for the one job it's genuinely good at, without surrendering everything else. ## Where lodos draws the line lodos is local-first to the core. Your vault, wiki, knowledge graph, tasks and AI all run on your Mac, with no account and no sign-up. The app is free precisely because running on your machine costs us nothing. The cloud shows up in exactly one place: **optional, encrypted sync**. > Everything is encrypted on your Mac before it leaves. Our servers only ever store ciphertext they can never decrypt, so even backup and multi-device sync give up none of the local-first guarantee. That's the whole pricing model, too. The app is free forever; the only thing you ever pay for is keeping an encrypted copy in the cloud and syncing it across your devices. Free to run, paid only to sync. You can read the reasoning on the [pricing page](/pricing). ## "But I need my data on every device" This is the objection that pushed a generation of tools into the cloud-only camp, and it's a fair one. The local-first answer isn't "go without sync"; it's "sync the ciphertext, not the plaintext." In lodos, syncing works like this: 1. A full snapshot of your workspace is encrypted on your device. 2. The encrypted blob, and only the blob, is uploaded. 3. Another device pulls it down and decrypts it locally, with a key that never left your hands. Set up a new Mac and you can pull your whole company back in minutes. The server that stored it the entire time learned nothing but its size and timestamp. ## Local-first and AI aren't opposites The common assumption is that serious AI requires shipping your data to a model provider. lodos is a counter-example: a built-in agent reads your local company context, does real work, and never sends your secrets anywhere. The model runs against your own Claude login; lodos never proxies it. If you want the details on how the agent gets context without getting your credentials, we wrote that up in [how your AI uses your Stripe key without ever seeing it](/blog/ai-that-cant-read-your-secrets). ## The bottom line Local-first isn't nostalgia for desktop software. It's a bet that the most valuable thing your company owns, its data, should answer to you, not to a billing relationship. lodos is built entirely on that bet. [Download lodos](/download) and keep your company where it belongs: on your machine.