2026.01.08
đź“° News & Discussions
LocalFirst: You Keep Using That Word
"'local-first' isn’t a binary label we can cleanly apply to something. It’s more of a spectrum." See also HN discussion
I analyzed 9,300+ "I wish there was an app for this" posts on Reddit. Here is the data on what people actually want
"About 7% of all requests (640+ posts) specifically asked for offline-first or privacy-focused tools. People are getting 'subscription fatigue' and want local-only versions of popular apps (especially in productivity)."
Engineering a Local-First Agentic Podcast Studio: A Deep Dive into Multi-Agent Orchestration
"At the core of our studio is a Local-First philosophy. While cloud-based LLMs are powerful, they introduce friction in high-frequency, creative pipelines. By using Ollama as a model manager, we run SLMs like Qwen-3-8B directly on user hardware."
A 30B Qwen Model Walks Into a Raspberry Pi… and Runs in Real Time
"Yes, this 30B Qwen3 runs on a Raspberry Pi. On a Pi 5 (16GB), Q3_K_S-2.70bpw [KQ-2] hits 8.03 TPS at 2.70 BPW and maintains 94.18% of BF16 quality. It genuinely feels real-time." See also HN discussion
ChEffect - Part 12
"A Local-First App built with Effect & LiveStore By Maxwell Brown & Tim Smart"
🛠️ Tools & Resources
FunctionGemma: Bringing bespoke function calling to the edge
"When to choose FunctionGemma: You prioritize local-first deployment: Your application requires near-instant latency and total data privacy, running efficiently within the compute and battery limits of edge devices."
AI Agent Automation: Automate with Agents, Stay Private.
"The self-hosted alternative to n8n and Zapier. Build, run, and schedule intelligent agent-driven pipelines entirely on your own infrastructure." "Your agents, your data, your infrastructure. No external API calls for logic processing, ensuring total privacy and zero vendor lock-in."
Arbor
"Graph-native code intelligence that replaces embedding-based RAG with deterministic program understanding." "Arbor is designed with a Local-First security model: No data exfiltration: All indexing and querying happens 100% locally. No code leaves your machine."
Show HN: Prism.Tools – Free and privacy-focused developer utilities
"40+ dev tools (JSON formatters, regex tester, base64 encoder, Git command helper, etc.) that run entirely in your browser. Zero tracking, zero analytics, zero data collection – everything processes locally. Self-contained HTML files with no build process or frameworks."
✨ Apps
Note67: Private Meeting Notes Assistant
"Capture audio, transcribe locally with Whisper, and generate AI-powered summaries — all on your device. No cloud."
twofa.dev
"A secure, privacy-focused authenticator app that generates Time-based One-Time Passwords (TOTP) completely offline in your browser." See also Reddit discussion
treeline
"Personal finance should be personal. A local-first, plugin-based finance app. Built on DuckDB."
Kurisu
"It's a statistical engine disguised as a dashboard. Drop in your data and watch it run real tests — Spearman Rank, Kruskal-Wallis, Mann-Kendall" "And it does all of this locally. Your data never leaves your machine. No cloud uploads, no monthly subscriptions, no tracking. Just you, your data, and an instrument built to respect both."
How to Contribute
Anyone can contribute to Local-First News with a pull request. Instructions and guidelines available here.
Sponsors
Local-First News is sponsored by PowerSync. Interested in sponsoring? Get in touch