The case for it
Why Smritsavant exists
Note apps quietly ask you to accept one of two bad trades. The first: give your notes to a company's servers and get modern features — AI, search, sync — in exchange for your archive of private thought living in someone else's database, under someone else's terms, at someone else's mercy on pricing. The second: keep your files local and give up the modern features, or bolt them on through plugins that each make their own network decisions.
We built Smritsavant because for notes, this trade is now unnecessary. The models are small enough. The hardware is fast enough. The whole modern feature set — semantic search, automatic linking, chat with citations, voice transcription — runs on the machine you already own.
Private by architecture, not by policy
A privacy policy is a promise; architecture is a fact. Smritsavant's privacy is structural:
- The AI runs on your device. Embedding, search, chat, transcription, image captioning — all in-process, on your hardware. There is no Smritsavant inference server.
- Egress is gated and audited. The only network calls the app can make are the ones you explicitly enable (a web-search key you provide, a cloud model you opt into with a consent screen that names the endpoint) — each goes to a single allowlisted host, and the in-app Network Audit counts every request.
- A test suite enforces it. The build fails if telemetry or an unlisted endpoint shows up. "We don't collect your data" is a CI gate, not a marketing line.
- Your account knows nothing. The license server stores your email, license, and device records. Notes never touch it.
Your data is yours — verifiably
Trust also has to survive the day you leave. Your notes live in a plain SQLite file on your disk. Any canvas exports to Markdown, HTML, JSON, or PDF. A standalone CLI —smritsavant-export — dumps the whole library as a portable markdown vault that other note apps open as-is, and it works even if the app won't launch or your trial expired. We publish theschema and formats. Leaving is a supported feature; we'd rather earn the next purchase than fence the exit.
Spatial, because thought isn't a list
Files and folders force every idea into exactly one place. Real thinking is associative — a note about a paper belongs to the course, the thesis, and the half-formed side project all at once. Smritsavant's canvas keeps notes as blocks in space, and its semantic memory keeps them connected by meaning: every note is embedded locally and auto-linked to its neighbors in thought, not in the file tree. The Cortex shows the clusters; the Chronicle shows the timeline; Brain shows the structure. Same memory, different projections.
AI-native, with the model on a leash
"AI-native" here means the intelligence is woven into the substrate — embeddings power linking and search all the time, quietly, offline — not that a chatbot rewrites your notes when you blink. The rules: chat answers cite the notes they came from, click to verify. Inline AI previews as ghost text you accept or discard. Larger operations — "revise this note", "consolidate these five" — always end at a block-level diff you approve. The model proposes; you decide. And because it's your hardware, an evening of heavy use costs zero API dollars.
The leash includes choosing the engine. Local models are the default, but they're a floor, not a cage: point the app at an Ollama server you run, or — behind an explicit consent screen that names the endpoint — bring your own API key to any OpenAI-compatible cloud provider and use a Claude- or GPT-class frontier model for chat when you want more horsepower. Even then the swap covers chat only: voice transcription, semantic search, and image captions stay on your device, voice can never be routed to a cloud, and notes in the Confidential group are never sent to any endpoint. Privacy by default, capability by choice — never the reverse, silently.
One purchase, because incentives matter
Subscriptions quietly invert a tool's incentives: the vendor profits from your inability to leave. A one-time license keeps us honest — we get paid when the product is worth buying, and again only when a major version is worth buying. Every dollar you've spent counts toward the $29 Cross-Platform tier, forever: the arithmetic is public.
What we traded away
These choices have real costs, and you should see them before you pay: no real-time collaboration. No web app. Model downloads measured in gigabytes, and local chat speed that scales with your hardware — including not-great on old laptops. No plugin marketplace. A two-person team instead of a platform company.The comparison page names the well-known tools that beat us where collaboration or an ecosystem matter most — and says so plainly. We built the tool for the other case: a private thinking space that's genuinely yours, with the intelligence built in.