Local-first, by default

Most apps you use today live somewhere else. You type into a browser tab, and your words travel across the internet to a server owned by a company you've never met. You're renting a space to think.

Atomus doesn't work that way. When you capture a note, the file goes straight to a folder on your Mac. When you review an atom, the scheduling state updates a database on your disk. Nothing leaves your machine unless you tell it to.

Your notes are files

Open your vault in Finder. You'll see what you'd expect. One Markdown file per note. Plain text, no proprietary format, readable in any editor you've ever used. If Atomus vanished tomorrow, your notes would still open in TextEdit, VS Code, Obsidian, or whatever comes next.

This is deliberate. A memory tool that holds your memory hostage isn't really a memory tool. It's a subscription.

No account, no cloud

You don't sign up for Atomus. There's no password, no email, no recovery link. You install the app, pick a folder for your vault, and you're done.

Nothing about your notes gets sent to us. We don't know how many notes you have, which ones you wrote today, or what they say. The app runs on your Mac and talks to your disk. That's it.

Sync, if you want it

Some people work across two Macs. Some want their vault backed up automatically. Atomus supports both, on your terms. The vault folder is just a folder, so you can drop it inside iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or any other filesystem sync tool. The files flow, we don't see anything.

No proprietary sync protocol. No cloud to trust. Your choice of where the folder lives decides how it syncs.

A principle, not a feature

This isn't a compromise we made to save on server costs. It's the reason Atomus exists. Memory is personal. Your notes are the closest record of how you think, and they should live on a device you own, in a format you can read, under rules you set.

Everything else follows from this.