Own your AI.
Don't rent your mind.

Almost every app that tracks your life does the same thing: it takes your most personal data, what you eat, how you sleep, your moods, the things you write at midnight, and keeps it on a server you'll never see. You don't own that copy. You rent access to it. And the rent is paid in data.

We think that's backwards. The most valuable thing a personal app can do is the one thing the industry refuses to do: leave. Stay on your machine. Never phone home. Make the default not "sync to the cloud" but "this never left."

So VAND is a local-first desktop app. It installs as a real native binary and writes everything to a single file on your own disk: ~/Library/Application Support/vand-desktop/vand.json. That file is yours. You can read it, back it up, copy it to a drive, or delete it. Removing the app and that file is the complete uninstall. There is nothing left on a server because there was never anything on a server.

The file is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, and the key is held by your operating system's keychain, or, if you opt in, derived from a passphrase only you know, so even an attacker with your keychain can't read it. There is no account to breach, no password to reset, no company that can be subpoenaed for your journal.

Even the intelligence is local. VAND ships with a private AI built in. It downloads its model once on first run, then runs entirely on your own machine. Your habits, your sleep, your mood never get shipped to a third-party API to be scored.

This is a worse product for the surveillance business model. There's nothing to mine, no engagement to farm, no profile to sell. It's a better product for anyone who wants a clear picture of their own life without handing that picture to anyone else.

We could have shipped this as one more cloud account with a privacy policy that asks you to trust us. We chose not to. A privacy policy is a promise. Local-first is a guarantee.

Quentin, founder