Where your tasks and notes actually live

Focusbox is a local-first focus app. By default, your tasks and notes don't live in someone's cloud — they live in a single file on your own disk, with no account to create and nothing tracked.

That's the default, not a setting you have to hunt for. When you open the app it just writes to your own machine. There's no sign-up, no telemetry, no analytics pinging home about how you use it. If you deleted your internet connection forever, Focusbox would keep working exactly the same.

It's also open source under the MIT license. The code is on GitHub, so you can read exactly what it does, check that the claims on this page are true, and build it yourself if you want to. "Trust me" is a lot weaker than "here's the source."

If you do want your work on more than one device, there's optional cloud sync, and I've tried to be precise about how it works. It's end-to-end encrypted: your tasks, notes, and settings are encrypted on your device before they leave it, so the server only ever holds encrypted blobs. It never receives your password or your keys, which means I can't read your data — this is what "zero-knowledge" means in practice.

One honest caveat on tiers. The web app uses the same end-to-end encryption, but the signed desktop app is the strongest tier, and it's the one I'd recommend if your notes are genuinely sensitive. Same encryption, slightly different threat model. You can read the full plain-language version on the privacy page.

Sync is the only paid part, and it's entirely optional. The app itself stays free, local-first, and open. That ordering is on purpose: your data is yours first, and the cloud is just a convenience you can switch on if you ever need it.