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Comment by piratebroadcast | Hacker News Reader

Rowboat markets itself as "local-first," but if you look in the actual codebase, transcription is Deepgram cloud, voice is ElevenLabs, analytics is PostHog, and the LLM is a cloud API.

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I had a hunch that would be the case. I'm always nervous pointing any AI tool at my email, browser, and finances. Any similar solution that's truly local-first?

Not right now but I'm actually exploring this idea space — doing user research —. I would be happy to chat with you – or whoever happens to read this and is into this topic – about that. simone [at] breadboards.io

Local-first for us means: your data such as emails, notes, meetings, the knowledge graph - lives on your machine as plain Markdown, readable and deletable, and the app doesn't require our servers to run. You can also go fully local for the LLM with Ollama or LM Studio. We do special handling there, like suppressing background agents during chat, so local models aren't overwhelmed. That's the core of the product.

Some third-party APIs we couldn't avoid (search has to be an API call). For TTS/STT we deliberately chose cloud quality over local support for now - if there's demand, we'll support local.

On PostHog: usage metadata only, never content. Anonymous install ID unless you sign in to Rowboat; email and plan attached after. Everything sent is cataloged in apps/x/ANALYTICS.md. We shipped v1 with no analytics and were flying little blind on whether anyone used it. If you build without the PostHog env vars, it no-ops entirely.

Instead of having to define what “local-first” means to you personally you should emphasize that the data lives on your local machine. For some example messaging take a look at how Apple is marketing their new Siri AI.

That's fair - "your data lives on your machine as plain files" is the concrete claim, and something we should lead with. Will take a look at how Apple frames it, thanks.

You have completely misused and re-purposed this term. The common interpretation is that the software will continue to function without an internet connection which is not the case for your product.

You should choose different language.

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