Why I built this
Privacy here is the architecture, not a setting. There is no cloud to opt out of, no account to delete, and no server that could be compelled to hand over your conversations — because no server has ever held one. There has never been a copy to leak, sell, subpoena or train on.
I kept having conversations I did not want to hand to a server. Client calls, hiring conversations, the kind of planning meeting where the interesting part is the bit you would not put in writing. Every tool that would have taken good notes from them wanted to upload the audio first.
That trade gets presented as unavoidable and it isn't. Transcription models run on a laptop now. So do summarisation models. The reason your audio goes to a data centre is that somebody built the product that way, usually because a subscription needs a server to justify itself.
So Zerds does the whole job on your machine, and it charges once. Everything is included: there is no tier above the one you buy, and no feature held back to create one. Subscriptions are not what software should be, and charging rent for access to your own conversations is a particularly bad version of it.
This is a small operation. It is not a startup with a runway and it is not going to pretend to be fifty people by saying "we". What it is: something built carefully, shipped when it is ready, and answerable to the people who paid for it rather than to anyone else.
What that commits it to
- Privacy is the architecture, not a setting
- There is no cloud, no Zerds server, no telemetry and no Zerds account. Not as a policy I could change, but as a fact about how the thing is built: there is nothing to upload to.
- You own it
- You buy it once and it is your copy, on your computer, running offline. No renewal, and nothing that expires while you are asleep.
- Your data stays yours, and stays usable
- On your disk, searchable, exportable, optionally encrypted. Data you cannot get back out is data somebody else controls.
- The AI is local too
- Summaries run on your machine. "Private" that dissolves the moment you want the software to be intelligent was never private.
- Both sides, done honestly
- On Discord, your bot is a visible participant that announces itself in the channel when it joins. Not a hidden scraper.
- Respect for your machine
- Deferred transcription, per-task GPU and CPU control, a lean build. Software should be a guest, not a squatter.
- Serious engineering, shown rather than claimed
- A published security posture, an audited dependency tree, commercially-licensed models only, and the NOTICES file in the build.