5 posts tagged with "Local-first"

MindMax itself is free to use: reading, writing, searching and keeping your files in your own folder cost nothing, and the only thing you pay for is AI work, either through a subscription or with your own API key. Opening a PDF, highlighting, searching your folder, editing a note and exporting to Word never spend credits. Asking, explaining, annotating, translating, recognising a scan or transcribing your voice is AI work, and does.

That line is deliberate, and this post explains where it sits and why — because "free tier" in most software means "a demo that runs out on day two", and that is not what we mean.

A local model through Ollama or LM Studio handles short, contained document work well — explaining a passage, answering a question about an open paper, tidying a note — and that work never leaves your machine. It struggles with long jobs that need a large context and reliable tool use: reading a whole book chapter by chapter, translating hundreds of pages, drafting something book-length.

That split is worth knowing before you start, rather than four hours into a job that will not finish.

Yes — every AI feature in MindMax works with your own API key, with no account, no weekly allowance and nothing held back. The subscription exists to save you from managing keys and invoices, not to unlock the product. This post explains why, and what running on your own key costs you.

If you already pay for an API, being told to buy a second subscription before an app will talk to a model is a bad trade, and everybody involved knows it. You are being charged twice for the same tokens — once by the provider, once by the app for the privilege of sending them.

So MindMax does not do that. Add your own key and every AI feature works the same way it does for a subscriber: the same tiers, the same tools, no account, no weekly allowance. Not a reduced mode, not a beta path, not a setting that quietly disables the interesting half of the product.

This post is about why that is not generosity.

The simplest way to use AI with an Obsidian vault is to open the same folder in a second app that reads it in place. MindMax opens your vault directly — no import, no copy, no upload of the whole folder — and can answer questions across your notes and the PDFs and EPUBs sitting in your attachments folder, with quotes that open on the page. Obsidian keeps working on the same files.

Most AI options for Obsidian are plugins that send note text to a model. They help with notes. They do very little for the other half of a typical vault: the two hundred PDFs your notes are about.

MindMax is a desktop app for macOS and Windows that reads, thinks and writes with you inside a folder you already own. Answers about your documents carry verbatim quotes you can click back to the page, and every AI edit to your writing arrives as a tracked change you accept or reject.

There are a lot of tools now that will read a PDF and talk to you about it. We built a different shape of thing, and it is worth being clear about why.