Nothing leaves
your Mac. Ever.
VAULT runs entirely on your machine. No telemetry, no accounts, no cloud round-trips. The pages below explain exactly where your data lives and how it's processed — plain enough to read in five minutes, precise enough to verify in thirty seconds.
Your memories live in a single file.
That file is a SQLite database. It's on your disk, inside your user folder, protected by macOS like every other app's data.
01
You own the file
Back it up, move it to a new Mac, inspect it with any SQLite viewer, delete it. The database is yours.
02
No server, no sync
VAULT never opens a socket to a remote host. No account, no upload, no background sync.
03
Sandboxed by macOS
The app only has access to folders you explicitly grant. Full-disk access is opt-in.
The AI runs on your CPU.
Every embedding, every semantic search, every summary — computed on your Apple Silicon chip by a local Ollama server. Zero network calls.
Your file leaves your machine.
- ✕Upload to OpenAI / Anthropic / Google
- ✕Stored on vendor servers (even if transiently)
- ✕Processed on GPU clusters you don't control
- ✕Subject to the vendor's retention policy
- ✕One API outage = search broken
Your file never moves.
- ✓Processed by Ollama on your Apple Silicon
- ✓Embeddings written to local SQLite
- ✓Runs without network entirely (verify in Airplane Mode)
- ✓Retention policy: you delete when you want to
- ✓Works the same on a plane, in a tunnel, offline
You can see them. You can delete them.
VAULT downloads its models through Ollama once, then keeps them on disk. Nothing is hidden — open Terminal and list them yourself.
Don't take our word for it.
Three thirty-second tests that prove VAULT doesn't talk to the network. Run any of them, any time.
Activity Monitor
- Open Activity Monitor → Network tab
- Search for “vault” or “ollama”
- Watch the Sent Bytes column while you use the app
- It will stay at 0 kB.
Airplane Mode
- Turn on Airplane Mode (or disconnect Wi-Fi + Ethernet)
- Open VAULT, add a file, search semantically
- Everything still works.
- A cloud-dependent app would error out here.
Little Snitch / Lulu
- Install any outgoing-connection firewall
- Launch VAULT
- No rule is ever requested — the app makes no outbound calls
- (Ollama only binds to 127.0.0.1)
Ready when you are.
Install VAULT and verify everything above on your own machine in under a minute.