Local-first

Most web apps are cloud-first: the server holds the true copy of your data, and your screen is a window onto it. Local-first reverses this. The device holds the true copy, reads and writes happen on it at once, and a server, if there is one, only carries copies between devices. Think of a paper notebook with an optional photocopier: the notebook is the original, the copies are conveniences, and spreadsheets saved as files on your own disk are the oldest example. The idea was set out by the research lab Ink & Switch in 2019, in an essay on software where you own your data in spite of the cloud. Note-taking tools, design canvases and password managers that open instantly, even in a tunnel, follow the same spirit.

The gains are concrete. Reading and searching your data needs no network round trip, so a flaky hotel connection costs nothing, and teams like it for another reason: a crash in the data center does not stop you from finishing your work, so it feels instant and keeps working offline. If the service closes or changes its terms, your data does not vanish with it. There is also less to leak, because a company that never holds your readable data cannot lose it in a breach or be asked to hand it over. Browsers help: they offer an on-device database, and the Web Crypto API can encrypt what is stored with a key the page uses without ever being able to read it.

The costs are real too, and honest software states them. A device can be lost, broken or wiped, and a browser can delete its site data when you ask it to. Keeping several devices in step needs a sync system that merges changes without conflicts, for which conflict-free replicated data types, or CRDTs, are one family of techniques, and searching across everything is harder when the data is spread out. Storage can also be limited: browsers set a quota per site, so a library of large videos does not fit forever. Local-first therefore comes with a plan for copies: an export, an encrypted backup, an encrypted sync, or all three.

NeverNo keeps your conversations, folders, characters, images and memory in a database called neverno, inside your browser, encrypted with an AES-256-GCM key that the browser will not let any script export. There is no readable copy on our servers. The consequence is simple and we state it plainly: if you erase everything in Settings, or clear the site's data in your browser, the database and the key go, and without an export, a backup or sync nothing can be recovered, by you or by us.

The way out is to make a copy while it is easy. You can export your history as a readable file, create a backup encrypted with a passphrase of your own (if you forget the passphrase, the backup is lost), or turn on encrypted sync between your devices with an account. The text of a message still crosses our servers to reach the model that answers it, and is not recorded in clear. GLM 5.3 Flash from Z.ai, free on NeverNo and able to read images, is one of the private models that does this work, with a context of 128,000 tokens, while your history stays on your device.