What Local-First Software Actually Rules Out

“Local-first” gets used as a marketing adjective more often than an engineering constraint. We'd rather be specific about what it rules out, so it's a claim you can check rather than one you have to take on faith.

No account for local use

Installing and using the free tier never creates an account, a login, or a cryptographic identity of any kind. There's nothing to register and nothing that can expire, because there's no server-side record of you to expire it against.

No query-time network call for a local-only vault

Recall against a local-only vault searches its own local authoritative collection, full stop, regardless of whether the machine is even connected to a network. It never falls back to a server for a better match, because for a local-only vault there is no server-side collection to fall back to. If a result comes from a stale cache, it says so, rather than silently presenting partial coverage as complete.

No directory gets read without you confirming it, locally

Document sync is configured entirely on the machine: local CLI commands, with every new ingestion root requiring an explicit, local confirmation before anything in it is read. That confirmation step never happens from a web dashboard; it happens on the device whose files are actually at stake.

The one rule with a named exception

We say “no outbound network” a lot for the free tier, and it needs one honest caveat once you pay for anything: paid device sync, which includes managed backup, is the one path that talks to a server we run, by design, not by accident. Everything in the free tier, meaning the daemon, recall, ingestion, and connectors, holds the line completely.

What local-first doesn't mean

It doesn't mean ModelBrain can never talk to another machine; paid networking exists precisely for that. It means the free, local core never needs to, and nothing about using it well requires you to eventually turn that on.