Why we built Ink & Key
Ink & Key is a notes and file system app with offline AI at its core.
We built this app because we wanted to get our own lives organized and as a response to both Big Tech and Big AI.
It's a response to Big Tech because you will never get locked out of your own things. Your subscription pays for a year of updates and support — new and existing features, performance, security, and upgrades to the models themselves. But if you choose not to renew, you won't get locked out of the app and your files stay as ordinary files on your own disk. You just won't get updates or support — and a future Windows update could eventually break it.
It's a response to Big AI because no one is training on your data, it can run offline, and most people don't even need or want the flagship models anyway. The free models are just fine, and the paid models are great for special projects. And the Annex gives you the best of both worlds, because the big models still have a place in our day — you hand them exactly what they need, and nothing else.
And it's a response to both, because AI is being built into your computer whether you asked for it or not — Microsoft's Recall taking screenshots of your desktop, Microsoft's Copilot wired into Windows, Apple Intelligence switched on by default across Macs with Apple silicon, another "we've updated our privacy policy" email every month. Ours is different in a way you can check yourself: unplug your router — it won’t even notice. You get to encrypt all your data with the same methods as popular apps like Signal, and your files never feed anyone's model.
We genuinely like using an app where the user actually owns everything in it. Our tagline: "The ink is yours. So is the key."
Anyone who regularly uses a laptop or PC and resonates with the above gets to be more productive and intentional with their career and personal life. Ink & Key gets to be your own personal library that follows you to a new job, a new house, a new creative project, or even the start of a business. It helps you find that legal paperwork you'd never want to upload to Claude or ChatGPT. It helps you write that next big thought that actually feels like yours, because it's all working offline. And the great part is that all the scary things about AI "knowing everything about you" disappear when the AI just sits on your computer and doesn't go anywhere.
The big companies forgot that real freedom requires ownership — they strip a little more of it away every time your files live on their servers, and every time you have to log in over Wi-Fi just to reach a feature.
Our customers didn't forget.