Your data never has to leave.
Local-first is not a privacy feature bolted onto a cloud product. It is the shape of the system: the runtime, the credential vault, the memory store, and the audit trail all live on your machine by default. Sending anything outward is a choice you make, not a condition of using the software.
An explicit inventory
Vague privacy claims are easy to write. Here is the concrete list of what AGNT stores and where it goes.
What this buys you
Work a cloud tool cannot touch
Local repositories, private network shares, an Obsidian vault, a database bound to localhost, a CLI installed on your laptop. None of these are reachable from a SaaS automation runner — all of them are ordinary targets here.
Volume stops being a tax
Local execution is not metered. Ten runs and ten thousand runs cost the same in platform fees, which means you can automate the high-frequency work that per-task pricing makes uneconomic.
No single point of failure
A vendor outage, a pricing change, or a company going out of business does not stop your automation. The runtime is installed on hardware you control, and it keeps working.
Air-gapped operation
Zero egress mode
Pair AGNT with a local model through Ollama or LM Studio and no data crosses your network boundary at any point in a run.
- Prompts execute against a local model server
- Filesystem access stays within your project root
- Receipts persist to local SQLite
- No external connection required to operate
Hosted models, still direct
Choosing a cloud model does not insert AGNT into the path. Requests go from your machine to that provider and back.
- Direct client-to-provider TLS requests
- Keys injected at call time, never logged
- No AGNT proxy and no prompt inspection
- Mix local and hosted models inside one workflow
Where the cloud does come in
Optional paid tiers add encrypted cloud vault backup and remote execution so agents keep running when your machine is off. That is opt-in and additive — Community Core is complete without it, and choosing it later does not convert AGNT into a cloud product. Details on the pricing page.