Your notes are yours. Your AI lives on your Mac.

Every day, a new AI startup launches. And almost every one of them follows the same pattern: they take your data, send it to a server (usually owned by OpenAI or Anthropic), process it, and send a result back.

For a notes app, this is a non-starter. Your notes are your private thoughts, your business strategies, your personal reflections. They don't belong on someone else's server.

The FoundationModels Architecture

When we built the "Ask my notes" feature, we made a hard choice: if it couldn't run on your device, we wouldn't ship it.

Thanks to Apple Silicon and the FoundationModels framework, modern Macs and iPhones are more than capable of running sophisticated language models locally. We use optimized versions of Mistral and Llama, tuned specifically for summarization and semantic search.

The Claude Proxy Exception

We do offer an optional integration with Claude for high-level creative brainstorming. However, our architecture is unique: we never send your full note body. Instead, we use local models to generate highly-compressed summaries or specific "knowledge snippets" that contain only the relevant context for your query.

Even then, this is 100% opt-in. By default, SwiftyNotes is a closed loop.

Threat Model: What leaves the device?

• Default Mode: Zero bytes. Everything stays on-device.
• CloudKit Sync: Encrypted data sent to your private iCloud container. Apple can't read it; we can't read it.
• AI Pro Features (Optional): Only specific, user-approved snippets are sent to our privacy-hardened proxy.

Privacy is a Binary

We believe privacy isn't a "gradient." You either have it or you don't. By prioritizing on-device processing, we ensure that even if our company disappeared tomorrow, your AI features would keep working, and your data would remain yours.

"The most important thing to understand about the future of AI is that it doesn't have to be a trade-off for your privacy."

In the "Settings" panel of SwiftyNotes, you'll find a single toggle:"Strict Local Mode." Turn it on, and the app physically severs all AI-related network connections. That's the Swifty promise.