Local-first AI for confidential work

Find any answer across your confidential documents in seconds.

An AI workspace that runs entirely on your own computer — without uploading anything. Built for lawyers, therapists, and accountants who simply cannot paste client files into ChatGPT.

Buy a licence — $149 How it works
  • 30-day refund No questions asked
  • Local-first Nothing leaves your machine
  • Perpetual licence Yours forever

See the product

See it work, before you buy it.

A minute of video and three screenshots will tell you more than any feature list. The actual app, on a real laptop, doing the work.

60-second walkthrough — drop a folder, ask a question, get cited answers.
  1. Screenshot: SealedBrief watching a documents folder being dragged in.

    Drop a folder

    Point SealedBrief at any folder of documents on your machine. Indexing runs locally and incrementally — no cloud upload, no third-party copy.

  2. Screenshot: SealedBrief query box with a question being typed.

    Ask a question

    Type any question in plain language. The retrieval engine pulls the relevant passages from your corpus and hands them to a local LLM.

  3. Screenshot: SealedBrief answer with inline citations linked to source passages.

    Get cited answers

    Every answer cites the source passages. Click any citation to jump straight to the original document — page, paragraph, exact line.

The honest case against cloud AI

What you give up to use cloud AI

  • Your prompts train someone else's model

    Cloud LLM providers reserve the right to retain inputs and reuse them for model improvement. The contract is one-way: you contribute, they keep.

    Source: EFF — Privacy

  • Privileged documents in third-party logs

    Uploading client material to a hosted AI service may breach attorney-client privilege and the duty of confidentiality. Most professional-conduct rules predate the cloud and don't carve an AI exception.

    Source: Attorney–client privilege

  • Air-gapped means air-gapped

    Classified, ITAR-restricted, or proprietary work has no exception for 'just this one prompt'. The cloud is the boundary, and modern AI tooling assumes you don't have one.

    Source: Air gap (networking)

How it works

Two processes. One contract.

SealedBrief runs as two operating-system processes that can't swap roles. One talks to the world. The other never does.

Split-Brain process model Process A (Presentation) on the left talks to the cloud for license validation only. Process B (Compute) on the right runs the LLM and indexes your local documents. The two communicate via IPC queues. Process B has no network egress; the network connection is severed by construction. ☁ sealedbrief.com license + updates Process A Presentation Flet UI License validator Update checker Process B Compute LLM inference RAG + FTS5 + vault OCR + ingestion cmd_queue evt_queue no egress
Process A talks to the world. Process B talks to your documents. They never swap roles.
A Presentation Plane contents
  • The Flet desktop window you actually see
  • License validation against sealedbrief.com
  • Optional update checker
  • NO document content ever crosses this boundary
B Compute Plane contents
  • The LLM that answers your questions
  • RAG retrieval, FTS5 inverted index, LanceDB vectors
  • OCR + multi-format document ingestion
  • Encryption at rest (AES-256-GCM, SQLCipher AES-256)
  • Zero network egress — verifiable with a packet capture during a query session

Regulatory fit · draft

The regulators that bind your work — and how SealedBrief's design satisfies them.

Every regulator-specific claim below is a legal claim. The text on this page is the engineering team's plain-English first draft; final copy is reviewed and approved by the operator's legal counsel before production deploy.

  • Lawyers

    ABA Model Rule 1.6 + state-bar opinions on AI tooling

    Client confidentiality under Rule 1.6 prohibits sharing privileged information with third parties absent informed consent. Cloud LLM providers are third parties. SealedBrief processes documents entirely on the lawyer's machine — no third party touches the file, the query, or the answer.

  • Mental health practitioners

    HIPAA — Privacy + Security Rules

    PHI shared with a cloud AI provider triggers the Business Associate Agreement (BAA) regime. SealedBrief is local-first software running on the practice device — no Business Associate relationship exists because no third party processes the data. The desktop application sends nothing to us, full stop.

  • CPAs and accountants

    IRS Pub 4557 + Gramm-Leach-Bliley Safeguards Rule

    Tax preparers and financial advisers are required to maintain a written information security program covering client PII (SSNs, financial records, etc.). SealedBrief keeps all client data on the practice machine, encrypted at rest, with no upload path. The Safeguards Rule's third-party-vendor due diligence simply does not apply because there is no vendor in the data path.

Security evidence

Four claims. Each one verifiable from your own terminal.

Marketing claims about confidentiality are easy to write and impossible to audit. Each claim below isn't an assertion — it's something you (or an IT person you trust) can verify on the live software in minutes. Step-by-step instructions ship with the product.

  1. Zero network traffic from the part that handles your documents

    Two processes run when the app is open: one talks to our licence server (and only our licence server); the other handles your documents and never opens a network connection. Monitor every connection the document-handling process tries to make — anything that isn't your own machine talking to itself is an immediate finding. Your IT person can reproduce this in five minutes.

    Network audit Independent network-traffic capture during a query session.

  2. Encryption at rest is real, not just claimed

    Open the database file SealedBrief writes to disk. It must be unreadable randomness — not your document text in a slightly-shuffled form. We pin the entropy floor at 7.5 bits per byte across every encrypted page; anything lower would mean plaintext is leaking through.

    Entropy audit Entropy floor on the encrypted database file.

  3. Master key never leaves the keychain

    Dump the live process's memory while the app is running. Scan for the master key bytes. Zero hits is the contract. The key lives in the OS keychain and is read into memory only for the AES context.

    Memory audit Process-memory scan for the master key while the app runs.

  4. Every metadata field is encrypted, not just the obvious ones

    Per-format coverage test reads the on-disk artefact for each supported document type and asserts no plaintext leaks. New ingestion formats fail this gate until they're wired through the field-encryption layer.

    At-rest audit Forensic check on every persisted document field.

Every claim above is checkable against the binary on your own machine. Walkthroughs ship with the product so you can reproduce the audit step-by-step.

Who built this

Built by one engineer with skin in the game.

Portrait of Alexandre Ashade, founder of SealedBrief.

I built SealedBrief because I watched colleagues paste confidential client documents into ChatGPT to save themselves twenty minutes — and saw nobody flinch. The lawyers and clinicians I know want the productivity. They don't want the contract violation. So I built the version that doesn't ask them to choose: the same retrieval engine, running entirely on the laptop they already own. No data leaves. No trust required of a third party. The audit harness ships in the box.

Alexandre Ashade Engineer · 15+ years building infrastructure for regulated industries

Who it's for

Three professionals who can finally use AI on their work.

  • Legal

    Solo litigator

    boutique law firm or in-house counsel

    Drops a folder of PDF depositions, contract drafts, and discovery exports into the watch directory. Asks the LLM to summarise opposing counsel's position across 800 pages without uploading a single one. Cites the resulting brief by paragraph and page number, lifted directly from the original PDFs.

  • Healthcare

    Mental health practitioner

    therapist, psychologist, or clinical social worker

    Indexes a private library of session notes, treatment plans, and intake forms — material covered by HIPAA that simply cannot ride a third-party API. Asks the LLM to surface themes across a long-running case, draft a referral letter from the relevant notes, or check a treatment plan against published guidelines. Nothing leaves the practice machine.

  • Finance

    Tax & accounting practitioner

    solo CPA, EA, or small-firm partner

    Ingests client returns, 1099s, K-1s, brokerage statements, and a decade of correspondence — all of it bound by client confidentiality. Asks the LLM to spot the line-item that changed year over year, draft a response to an IRS notice, or walk back the basis on an inherited asset. Personally identifiable financial data stays where it belongs.

What this is not

Honest about what SealedBrief doesn't do.

Every privacy product over-promises. Here is the list of what we don't do — read it before you buy. If something on the list is non-negotiable for your workflow, this isn't the right tool, and we'd rather you know now than ask for a refund in three weeks.

  • Doesn't process images, audio, or video.

    Documents only — PDF, DOCX, TXT, MD, EPUB, HTML, and the usual office formats. If your workflow involves transcribing meeting recordings or analysing surveillance video, this isn't the tool.

  • Doesn't act as an agent.

    SealedBrief reads your documents and answers questions about them. It doesn't browse the web, send emails on your behalf, file court documents, or execute commands on your machine. There is no "agent loop" — every interaction is a single ask-and-answer.

  • Doesn't research the internet.

    Every answer is grounded in your own corpus. The LLM cannot reach for external sources mid-conversation — no Wikipedia lookup, no Westlaw search, no PubMed query. If you want current case law or fresh financial filings, paste the document into your folder and re-index.

  • Doesn't replace specialist tools.

    SealedBrief is a reading + recall layer over your documents. It is not a case-management system, an EHR, a general-ledger product, or a billing platform. It complements those tools by letting you query the documents they hold; it doesn't replace them.

  • Doesn't run on a server in V1.0.

    Single-user, single-machine. Your licence is bound to a human, not a workstation, and you can run it on as many of your own machines as you want — but the documents on machine A are not visible from machine B unless you copy them. Multi-user / shared-vault / server-mode is V2 scope.

Pricing

$149. Yours forever.

14-day free trial. No credit card required for the trial.

Soft-launch First 20 customers pay $129 with code SEALEDBRIEF20. (20 spots)

149 paid once

  • ChatGPT Plus $240/yr
  • Microsoft Copilot $360/yr/seat
  • SealedBrief $149 once
  • Linux .deb + .AppImage downloads
  • Ed25519-signed perpetual licence
  • Major-version updates within the V1.x line
  • Email support — replies from the engineer who shipped it
  • Refund within 30 days, no questions asked
Start free trial Buy now — $149

FAQ

Frequently asked, plainly answered.

  • Does any data leave my machine?

    No. The Compute Plane — the part that touches your documents — has no network egress by construction. The Presentation Plane talks to sealedbrief.com only for licence validation and update checks. You can verify the contract yourself with a packet capture during a query session.

  • What hardware do I need?

    Apple Silicon M-series Mac or a Linux workstation with at least 16 GB RAM and 20 GB free disk. GPU acceleration is optional but makes ingestion roughly 3× faster on systems with CUDA. The default models are tuned to run on consumer hardware without a discrete GPU.

  • Why Linux first? When macOS or Windows?

    V1.0 ships Linux (.deb + .AppImage) because the toolchain stabilised there first. macOS lands in V1.0.1 once Apple notarisation is in place. Windows follows when an encryption-library dependency we rely on is fully resolved on Windows.

  • How does the licence work offline?

    Each licence is an Ed25519-signed file you download once at purchase. The app verifies the signature locally — no network round-trip needed. Only the initial activation and optional update checks call sealedbrief.com.

  • Do you collect telemetry?

    No, by default. The app ships with crash reporting opt-in disabled. If you opt in (offered during the first-20-customer onboarding), only anonymised stack traces and error types are sent — never document content, never user prompts.

  • What happens if you stop maintaining the product?

    The licence is perpetual and verifies offline, so the app keeps working without internet — including the day after we shut down. There's no server you depend on for the product to function past activation.

  • How accurate are the answers?

    Every answer is grounded in retrieved passages from your own documents and shows the source paragraphs alongside the response. The LLM is constrained to cite — when it can't ground a claim in your corpus it says so rather than inventing a citation. Treat the output the way you'd treat a junior associate's draft: review the citations before you use it.

  • What models can I use?

    Any GGUF-format LLM that fits in your VRAM or RAM. The app ships with sensible defaults (Qwen 2.5 and Llama 3.x at sizes matched to common hardware). You can swap in any custom GGUF you trust — the model loader doesn't care about provenance, only about the file format.

  • How do I migrate from ChatGPT or Notion AI?

    Export your existing notes, conversations, and documents to a folder. Point SealedBrief's watcher at it and the ingestion engine indexes everything in place — there's no proprietary store. Standard formats are supported: PDF, DOCX, TXT, MD, EPUB, HTML, and more.

  • Refunds?

    30 days, no questions asked. Email refunds@sealedbrief.com and we issue the refund through Stripe within 5 business days. Your licence is then added to the revocation list (CRL) so it can no longer activate.

Free whitepaper

Not ready to buy? Read the audit framework first.

A 5-page PDF covering the security claims SealedBrief makes — what they mean for your regulatory regime, how to audit each one yourself, and what to ask any vendor before trusting them with confidential documents. Free, ungated by everything except a single email field.

Download the whitepaper (PDF)

Want updates on the launch? Email us — we'll add you to the announce-only list.

One email when the whitepaper sends, then a short 4-email series over three weeks. No marketing blasts, no third-party trackers, no resale. You can ask us to delete your address any time.

Mac version

On a Mac? We'll tell you when the macOS build is ready.

V1.0 ships Linux first. The Mac build follows in V1.0.1 once Apple notarisation is in place. Drop your email and we'll send a single message when the macOS download is available — no marketing, no drip campaign, one email and that's it.

Email us to join the waitlist

We use your email only to notify you when the Mac build ships. We don't share it, sell it, or use it for anything else. You can ask us to delete it any time.