Local-first
Local-first is not a slogan here - it is an architectural constraint that shapes the whole system.
What it means
Section titled “What it means”- It runs on your hardware. The control plane, the agents it spawns, and the models you host are all processes on your machine. There is no M.A.V.E.N server in the path.
- Your data stays put. Prompts, outputs and vault artifacts are written locally - into your Obsidian vault, one folder per app, with the Media Library reading it back. Cloud model providers see only what you send them directly, through your own keys - M.A.V.E.N does not proxy or relay it.
- Credentials are yours. Keys live in
.env.localon disk. M.A.V.E.N reads them to reach providers; it never forwards them anywhere else. - It works offline for everything that can. Local models, document conversion, transcription and the docs you are reading now need no network at all.
The consequences you can see
Section titled “The consequences you can see”This constraint is visible in the product’s edges:
- The documentation site (this one) makes zero external network requests - fonts are self-hosted, search runs in your browser, there are no analytics or trackers.
- Free, offline engines are provisioned during install where a local option exists (Kokoro, Supertonic, Whisper, yt-dlp, anydoc, the watermark engine), so a key-free setup still does real work.
- Remote access is opt-in and PIN-gated; loopback needs nothing. See Security & remote access.
The trade-off
Section titled “The trade-off”You run the infrastructure. That is the cost of the guarantees above, and it is the audience M.A.V.E.N is built for - engineers who deploy their own stack.