Why local-first, and what we give up for it

Local-first is a simple idea with stubborn consequences: your data lives on your device first, and the network is an enhancement rather than a requirement. The files are yours, the app keeps working on a plane, and nothing about your work is sitting on a server you do not control. We reach for it often — but it is a trade, not a free lunch.

What you get

• Ownership. Your data is on your machine in a form you can read, back up, and take with you. No account required to keep what you made.
• Speed. Reads and writes hit local storage, not a round trip to a data center. The interface stays instant.
• Privacy by default. What never leaves your device cannot be mined, leaked, or sold. The safest data is the data we never collect.

What we give up

Honesty means naming the costs. Syncing across devices is genuinely hard when there is no single source of truth — merging two offline edits is a real engineering problem, not a checkbox. Some conveniences that cloud apps get for free, like server-side search across everything or effortless real-time collaboration, take deliberate work or are not offered at all. We accept that friction because of where it puts the control.

The cloud is convenient because it is someone else's computer. Local-first is less convenient for the same reason — and that is the point.

So we choose local-first when the data is genuinely yours — your notes, your work, your reference — and the value of owning it outweighs the convenience we give up. When a product needs the cloud to make sense, we say so plainly rather than pretending the trade away.