A local-first personal life OS that unifies your finances, knowledge, calendar, tasks, habits, and an AI assistant into one fast desktop app. No cloud account. No data broker. Just your stuff, on your disk.
Most people run their life across a dozen apps — a budgeting SaaS that sells anonymized spend data, a note-taking tool syncing to someone else's cloud, a calendar, a habit tracker, a password manager, an AI chatbot trained on your prompts. Compass collapses all of that into a single offline desktop app where the data lives on your machine and stays there.
It's a daily driver: open it in the morning for your brief (calendar + tasks + money + inbox), capture notes and expenses through the day, and review your week on Sunday. The only thing that ever leaves your device is an OAuth token you explicitly grant (to pull your own Google/GitHub/bank data) — and even your AI assistant runs locally first.
- 🛡️ The privacy-conscious power user (primary). You already juggle Obsidian + YNAB/Monarch + Notion + a calendar, and you're tired of your life being scattered across five subscriptions that monetize you. Compass is the single private hub you've been hand-rolling.
- 🚀 The busy founder / professional. You need a real command center — today's calendar, GitHub issues, email action items, and your cash position — without piping your company and personal life through someone else's servers.
- 🧠 The quantified-self / PKM enthusiast. You want linked notes (
[[wikilinks]]+ backlinks), finances, and habit streaks in one searchable, scriptable, plain-files-on-disk store you fully own.
| Overview — the default landing page and flagship "one place for all your data" home: a unified summary across finances, timeline, tasks, and calendar the moment you open the app. | |
| Finance command center — net worth, 90-day cash-flow forecast, subscription audit, budgets, tax tagging. |  |
| 90-day forecast — projects subscriptions, income, debt minimums + calendar bills into a daily balance, with low-cash warnings. |  |
| Retirement — a Monte-Carlo, tax-aware retirement planner: accumulation → decumulation projection, Social Security claiming-age math, sequence-of-returns stress testing, and scenario/optimizer tooling. | |
| Rental Studio — a Costa Rica short-term-rental pricing tool: nightly-rate comps by zone/bedroom count and occupancy-based revenue projections for a property you operate. | |
| Storehouse & Timeline — the Acquisition Engine: drop any data export (CSV / JSON / PDF / mbox / zip / SQLite) into the Drop Zone and Compass normalizes it into one append-only, searchable life timeline — PayPal, Venmo, Amazon, LinkedIn, Goodreads, streaming history, browser history, iMessage, Apple Health, and PDF letters (credit report, tax, Social Security). |  |
| People & Merchants and Places — the timeline cross-referenced into a searchable People directory and a Merchants & Places view, with one-click promote from raw records. | |
Knowledge base — plain-markdown notes with [[wikilinks]], backlinks, full-text + semantic search. |
|
| Ask Compass — a RAG assistant grounded in your knowledge base. Bring your own key; runs against local Ollama first. |  |
| Weekly review — a Sunday ritual: progress, open issues, what-went-well / blockers / next-week. |  |
| Encrypted vault — AES-256-GCM secrets (financial, identity, credentials, medical, legal). Master key in the OS Keychain — never on disk in plaintext. |  |
Screenshots are generated from synthetic demo data via
npm run screenshots. No real data is ever shown.
✅ Available today · 🔜 Upcoming (see Roadmap)
| Area | Capabilities |
|---|---|
| 💰 Finance | ✅ CSV / PDF / Excel statement ingest · ✅ auto-categorization · ✅ net-worth tracking + trajectory · ✅ 90-day cash-flow forecast · ✅ subscription & price-hike audit · ✅ budgets · ✅ Schedule C/E + capex tax tagging + tax-pack export · ✅ SimpleFIN bank + card sync (recommended; incl. Amex) · ✅ Plaid bank-linking (advanced) · ✅ investment holdings (generic brokerage-CSV import — manual, not a live feed) · ✅ Retirement planner (Monte-Carlo, tax-aware, SS claiming-age math) · ✅ Rental Studio (CR short-term-rental pricing) · 🔜 receipts via email · 🔜 live brokerage feed |
| 🗂️ Storehouse | ✅ Drop Zone for any data export (CSV / JSON / XML / mbox / zip / SQLite / PDF) · ✅ append-only searchable Timeline · ✅ "on this day" recap · ✅ recognizers: PayPal · Venmo · Amazon · LinkedIn · Goodreads · Netflix / Spotify / YouTube history · Chrome / Firefox / Safari history · iMessage · Apple Health · email (mbox) · ✅ PDF recognizers: credit report · tax docs · Social Security statement · ✅ Contacts · ✅ People directory · ✅ Merchants & Places · ✅ Data-Rights Concierge · ✅ assisted-login portal pull (SSA, beta) |
| 📚 Knowledge | ✅ markdown notes · ✅ [[wikilinks]] + backlinks · ✅ TipTap rich editor · ✅ full-text + semantic (local-embedding) search · ✅ Spotlight mirror · ✅ Obsidian vault bridge (import + export) · ✅ Notion import · 🔜 Notion export · 🔜 web clipper |
| 🔐 Vault | ✅ AES-256-GCM encrypted categories · ✅ OS-Keychain master key · ✅ auto-lock · ✅ 1Password CSV import · 🔜 encrypted sharing with a trusted partner |
| 📅 Calendar | ✅ Google Calendar · ✅ Apple Calendar (local .ics, RRULE expansion) · 🔜 Outlook / Office 365 · 🔜 CalDAV |
| ✅ Tasks & habits | ✅ daily / weekly / monthly checklists · ✅ habit streaks · ✅ tray quick-capture · ✅ multi-type capture bar (task / note / expense) · ✅ compass:// URL scheme · ✅ Todoist sync · ✅ Things 3 import · 🟡 Reminders sync (spike in #376, notarization-gated) · 🔜 voice capture |
| 🤖 Assistant | ✅ RAG over your knowledge base · ✅ BYO Anthropic/OpenAI key · ✅ local Ollama option · ✅ agentic mode (Claude tool-use over your data; proposes changes via the Claude Inbox) · ✅ proactive insights · ✅ Morning Brief digest (low-cash + price-hike alerts) |
| 🔎 Search | ✅ global ⌘K across notes, tasks, vault titles, transactions |
| 🔗 Integrations | ✅ Google · ✅ GitHub · ✅ Gmail action items · ✅ SimpleFIN · ✅ Plaid · ✅ Apple Calendar · ✅ Linear · ✅ Todoist · 🔜 Slack · 🔜 Jira · 🔜 Strava · 🔜 browser extension |
| 🧩 Platform | ✅ local MCP server (agent introspection) · ✅ encrypted backup / restore · ✅ auto-update · 🔜 public plugin API + marketplace · 🔜 opt-in E2E-encrypted sync · 🔜 mobile companion |
| 🤝 Claude | ✅ MCP (read + propose) for Claude Code · ✅ BYO-key Ask Compass · ✅ confirmed-write Claude Inbox · ✅ end-user plugin + Compass skills (morning brief, weekly review, budget check, plan-my-week, web capture) · ✅ embedded agentic Ask Compass (Claude tool-use + propose) · ✅ one-click .mcpb Claude Desktop bundle · ✅ compass_timeline MCP tool (query your whole Timeline from Claude) |
Compass works with Claude in both directions — it exposes its data to Claude over MCP, and embeds Claude inside the app — built so an assistant can help with your life OS without silently mutating it or leaking it. Full design: docs/claude-integration.md.
- Claude reads your Compass — today via the MCP in Claude Code ("what's on my plate today?", "search my notes for X", "show my Timeline"), and via the end-user plugin (
claude-plugin/) in Cowork/Desktop with ready-made skills (morning brief, weekly review, budget check). A one-click.mcpbbundle (npm run build:mcpb) installs the read+propose server into Claude Desktop. - Claude acts on your Compass — today through confirmed writes: Claude proposes a change (a task, a note, a transaction tag) via the MCP and you approve it in the Claude Inbox inside Compass. Compass stays the sole writer; every change is human-approved.
- Compass embeds Claude — "Ask Compass" answers grounded in your knowledge base (BYO key, local-Ollama-first), plus an Agent mode where Claude reads your agenda + finance summaries via tools and proposes changes you approve in the Claude Inbox (e.g. "plan my week"). Proactive insights surface anomalies and nudges in-app.
🔒 What Claude never sees: your vault (secrets) is categorically excluded, and finance is exposed as summaries, not raw transactions. Cloud LLM access is always BYO-key and opt-in. See the security model.
Compass is an Electron app with a hard security boundary: the React renderer is sandboxed and can only talk to the Node main process through a typed IPC bridge. All data — SQLite DB, encrypted vault, markdown knowledge base — lives in your OS application-data directory (on macOS, the primary target: ~/Library/Application Support/Compass/).
flowchart LR
subgraph R["Renderer · React (sandboxed)"]
UI["Pages · Zustand · TipTap"]
end
subgraph P["Preload"]
B["contextBridge\n(window.api)"]
end
subgraph M["Main · Node (full access)"]
IPC["IPC handlers\nelectron/ipc/*"]
DB[("SQLite\nbetter-sqlite3")]
V[["Vault\nAES-256-GCM"]]
KB["Knowledge\nmarkdown + chokidar"]
CRON["Sync cron"]
end
UI <-->|"typed IPC"| B
B <-->|"ipcRenderer ↔ ipcMain"| IPC
IPC --> DB
IPC --> V
IPC --> KB
CRON --> IPC
contextIsolation: true, nodeIntegration: false — the renderer never imports Node. CSP blocks remote scripts and eval in production.
The only bytes that leave your machine are OAuth tokens (encrypted at rest) and the API calls you opt into — to pull your own data back.
flowchart TB
subgraph device["🖥️ Your machine (everything below is local)"]
sqlite[("SQLite DB")]
vault[["Encrypted vault\n(key in OS Keychain)"]]
notes["Markdown notes"]
ollama["Ollama (local LLM)"]
end
subgraph net["🌐 Only with your explicit consent"]
g["Google / Gmail"]
gh["GitHub"]
fin["SimpleFIN / Plaid (banks)"]
llm["Anthropic / OpenAI\n(only if you add a key)"]
end
device -->|"OAuth token + pull my data"| net
net -->|"my calendar / issues / transactions"| device
Electron 41 · React 18 + TypeScript · Drizzle ORM / SQLite (better-sqlite3) · TipTap editor · Recharts · Tailwind (indigo-on-navy theme, Inter + JetBrains Mono) · Vitest + Playwright · Biome · electron-vite / electron-builder.
# Prerequisites: Node 20+ (nvm), npm
npm install # installs deps + rebuilds native modules for Electron
npm run dev # Electron + Vite HMR
npm run build # production build
npm run typecheck # renderer + main type-check
npm run check # Biome lint + format
npm test # Vitest unit testsPrimary target is macOS (signed releases via GitHub Actions); Windows (nsis/portable) and Linux (AppImage/deb) build targets exist. First launch seeds a starter knowledge base and an onboarding wizard.
Compass is 100% local today. The roadmap below is an expert-team evaluation of what turns it into a daily driver and a platform. Items marked (opt-in cloud) are a deliberate, clearly-bounded departure from local-only — always opt-in, never the default. Full detail + sizing lives in docs/implementation_plan.md (Phases 0–11). The latest direction — a cross-border / retirement layer (Phase 11) — comes from the June expert panel in docs/strategic-review-2026-06.md.
Shipped so far: Morning Brief digest, weekly/monthly review rituals, multi-type quick-capture, Notion import + Obsidian bridge, Todoist / Things / Linear, proactive insights, the agentic "plan my week", plus the Storehouse (Contacts · Subscriptions · Assets) and the Acquisition Engine (Drop Zone · Timeline · ~44 recognizers · People · Data-Rights Concierge). What's still ahead:
timeline
title Compass platform roadmap (remaining)
Track A · Daily driver : Voice quick-capture
Track B · Integrations : Slack : Jira : Outlook / CalDAV : Strava : Browser web-clipper : Notion export
Track C · Platform & API : Plugin / extension API : Integrations marketplace : Webhooks + expanded MCP
Track D · Sync & reach : E2E-encrypted sync (opt-in cloud) : Mobile companion (opt-in cloud) : Encrypted sharing
Track F · Polish : Theming : Mobile-responsive : Accessibility pass
- Local-first by default — data lives on disk; nothing is uploaded to a Compass server (there is no Compass server).
- Vault — AES-256-GCM, random IV + authTag per blob; master key generated once and sealed by the OS Keychain (
safeStorage). Plaintext secrets never hit disk. - OAuth tokens — encrypted at rest, kept in the main process, never exposed to the renderer or logs.
- AI is opt-in and local-first — Ask Compass prefers a local Ollama model; cloud LLM keys are BYO and only used on requests you trigger.
- Hardened renderer —
contextIsolation, nonodeIntegration, production CSP with an explicit network allowlist.
See docs/architecture.md for the full security model.
docs/architecture.md— process boundary, DB schema, IPC map, security modeldocs/conventions.md— TS/React style, IPC + toast patternsdocs/integrations.md— how to add a new integrationdocs/implementation_plan.md— full feature ledger + roadmap (Phases 0–11)docs/storehouse-roadmap.md— the Acquisition Engine (Phase 10) strategy + data-source catalogdocs/strategic-review-2026-06.md— the June expert panel + the Phase 11 proposal
Proprietary / all rights reserved (UNLICENSED). Not currently open for redistribution.