Actual is local first; the database that powers Actual Budget, and ultimately your budget, lives on your device. It is not stored on a server. "Actual server" allows you to sync changes to your budget on different devices. To do this, only the changes to the budget are sent to the server. The server stores the messages, and the local client pulls down the change(s).

That's why we automatically sync all of your data to your selected server in the background. You get the best of both worlds: all data is local by default, but if internet is available, your data is seamlessly backed up and synced to all other devices. This is the opposite of most apps which heavily rely on the internet to be available.

Totally. It's actually the most scalable architecture you could possibly have, because you don't even need a server.

It is a cross-platform, local-first API that works on the web as well... Getting that to work required significant investment and novel research, requiring new ways of doing things.

But to be honest, somewhat groundbreaking innovations to use SQLite in a persistent way in the browser, but it stores the file chunks in IndexDB, and it actually blows away IndexDB's performance. It's a significant undertaking; we're dealing with writing C code to optimize file disk access, so that it works better with IndexDB. So it's not something that's a typical SaaS app that a company is going to come in and buy, and then suddenly like "Let's ramp it up to get 20,000 users and just scale it out in all of the ways that are normal, that we're used to."

For example, local-first. The app is just -- Jerod Santo: Fast. James Long: ...fast by default. I mean, it's no question. That's the first thing that everybody always says when they try the app. They feel it. They feel their data sitting right there on the hard disk. And I don't have to think about it. I can run 100 queries straight from the frontend, not even in the backend. So there is kind of a frontend and a server process running, but that process is always a local process. I can run queries, send them to the server, and I can fire off 100 right from the frontend, and you don't feel that at all. It's one of those things that just changed the whole experience of the app. There's no - you do a bulk edit of your 3,000 transactions in an account, because you're doing something crazy and you're really restructuring things, and you bulk-edit things to add a note to these 3,000 transactions, so you select them all and type "archived". It happens in 200 milliseconds. Whereas you go to any other app and there's this huge cliff of anything that's outside of the ordinary workflow that they've specifically manually optimized - suddenly it has to span their five database clusters, and it takes you'll see the loading spinne

We're hoping that together in the open-source, local-first community, we can build something better than any closed-source alternative. The code is open-source because I believe that fundamental tools shouldn't require trusting a black box. Companies pivot, get acquired, or shut down. But open source is forever.

I really like hands-free voice dictation. For years, I relied on transcription tools that were almost good, but they were all closed-source. Even those claiming to be "local" or "on-device" were still black boxes that left me wondering where my audio really went. So I built Whispering. It's open-source, local-first, and most importantly, transparent with your data. ​​Your data is stored locally on your device, and your audio goes directly from your machine to a local provider

Local-first apps that write to files you own. Your data lives on your machine as plain Markdown and SQLite: grep it, version it, open it in Obsidian. When an app stops mattering, your files don't.

Whispering is now part of Epicenter, an ecosystem of local-first, open-source apps. Everything else remains the same—same tools, same philosophy, same team.