What is local-first software?

The phrase comes from a 2019 Ink & Switch essay by Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg and Mark McGranaghan. Their complaint was that cloud apps had traded ownership and longevity for convenience. In a local-first app the primary copy lives on your machine. It opens without a server and keeps working if the company behind it shuts down.

Local does not mean isolated. Plenty of local-first apps sync across devices or let people edit together using CRDTs, but the server helps rather than owns. An exported file or a direct peer-to-peer connection can do the job a central account does in a cloud app.

For money tools the privacy side is the real draw. If your watched addresses, manual holdings and layouts never leave the device, no server builds a profile of what you own. The catch is that nobody else holds a copy. Clear the browser's site data or lose the laptop and the data is gone, unless you exported a copy.

For instance, you build a trading board on a laptop, export it as a file and import it on a desktop PC. No account is involved, and no copy sits on a vendor's server along the way.

Also called: local-first, local-first apps.

Cashboard is built this way, and there is no account on either version. In the browser a board stays in that browser's storage on that one device. In the desktop app it goes into a SQLite database on your disk. Moving a board to another machine works like the example above: export a file, import it on the other one. Share links carry the layout after the # in the URL, the part browsers never send to a server. No cloud backup exists, so exporting is on you.

• Note
• Portfolio

• Official documentationinkandswitch.com
• Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

• Trading dashboard
• Watch-only wallet
• Portfolio tracker
• Self-custody