“Local-first” has become a word people put on a landing page, which means it has mostly stopped meaning anything. In Context it means one specific thing: your notes, tasks, files and vault records are created on your device and stay in encrypted storage there, and sync ships switched off so nothing leaves until you decide it should.
That is a real design decision with real consequences in both directions. Here is the ledger.
What you gain
One search over everything you keep. Notes live in a tree with subpages, tags and starred items. Tasks are dated, with Today, Tomorrow and This week ready out of the box; files and PDFs sit next to the notes about them, and vault records stay encrypted and masked. ⌘K searches across all of it. So you never have to remember which of four apps you put something in. Turkish search handles Turkish characters properly, because we are its first users.
Nothing leaves on its own. Sync is off by default. Optional AI help is off by default too; switched on, it reads only the notes relevant to your question and names the note it used in the answer, and it stays out of the vault. Two switches, both off when you arrive, both yours to flip.
Trying it costs a tab. No account, no card. Open the web version and it is the whole product, not a cut-down trial copy. If it is not for you, close the tab; nothing was uploaded that you now have to go and delete.
The exit is built in. Markdown export works today, and the vault backup can be exported separately. We say this is insurance rather than a feature, which is a slightly strange thing for a product to advertise. But a workspace you cannot leave is a workspace you should not move into.
What you give up
Recovery becomes your job. A nightly snapshot runs on your device, with a restore history and a recovery path onto a clean machine. That is genuinely useful. It still isn’t a backup in the sense that matters most, because it lives on the same device as the thing it protects. Dropped laptop, dead drive, stolen bag: the snapshot goes with it. If you want a copy that survives the device, you have to make one.
One machine, for now. The web version is live; macOS, iOS, Android and the browser extension are still in development, and we do not give dates because dates we miss are worse than none. With sync off, “another device” means another empty workspace. Turning sync on solves that and costs you the thing you switched sync off for. That is the trade itself, not a bug in it.
Collaboration is not the model. Nothing here is built around a shared document. If your work needs to be read by somebody else while you are writing it, no setting fixes that.
The product is young and says so. Version 0.4 is not a stable release; the data format is still moving. There has been no independent security audit: the scope and auditor agreement are drafted, and there is no report. End-to-end encryption is not complete for every scenario. The security page carries the full list, and because we update it whenever the product changes, the list you read today may not be the one you read in six months.
The routine that makes the trade safe
Four steps, once, then almost never again:
- Open the backup screen and read it. When did the last snapshot run, how much space does it take, what is in the restore history. Knowing what normal looks like today is what lets you notice abnormal later.
- Export to Markdown and move the export off the machine. External drive, or whatever cloud storage you already trust for exactly this.
- Decide about sync on purpose, not by drifting. On means an account and a copy elsewhere; off means one copy you control. Both are defensible. The only indefensible option is “I never thought about it”.
- Put a reminder somewhere to repeat step two each term, each quarter, whatever your unit of time is. This is the whole discipline.
Who this actually suits
Someone whose work happens on one machine and who would rather have one copy they understand than three copies they have to reason about. In practice that is a lot of students and teachers writing on a single laptop. The Education plan is half price at $2.50 (100 ₺) a month, verified with a school email, with everything the Standard plan has.
It suits you less if you move between three devices every day, or if the notes only mean something once someone else can see them. We are spelling that out so it does not read as a soft “it depends”: you are better served knowing it before you move a term’s worth of notes.
The part we will not dress up
A local-first workspace does not remove risk. It moves risk: from a company you cannot inspect to a device you can, and from an outage you cannot control to a backup habit you can. That is a good trade for a lot of people and a bad one for some, and the honest version of this post ends by putting the trade in front of you rather than telling you which one you are.