Session notes that stay on your machine, by design

Picture the difference between a private office with a locked filing cabinet and a regional records archive shared by many practitioners. Both can be legitimate, both have rules around them, but the threat model is very different. Free Korely is the office and the filing cabinet. No regional archive in the chain.

In practice this means three things.

• The vault is a folder of Markdown files on your encrypted disk, in a location you chose.
• Recorded session transcription runs on your CPU through a local Whisper model. Nothing is sent to a transcription service.
• Free Korely has no upload code path for your notes, so even an accidental network call would not have a place to go.

If your disk is encrypted at rest and you do not turn on Pro cloud sync, your session notes are exactly as private as any other file on your laptop. No SaaS provider has a copy. No vendor breach can leak them.

Picture preparing for supervision with index cards colour-coded by theme: blue for attachment, yellow for performance anxiety, green for family of origin. The cards never have a name on them, just a code. When you fan them out you can see which theme has been recurring this month, across which sessions, without identifying anyone. The entity graph works the same way for tagged themes inside Korely.

Concretely: label clients as A, B, C in your notes instead of names, or use a separate cipher you keep offline. Tag themes the way you already do in supervision prep. The graph links notes that share themes across the placeholders, so you can ask "which clients have I seen with this pattern recently?" without putting identifying data into the notes in the first place.

Picture the private notebook a clinician keeps on the desk between sessions. Reflections, hypotheses, supervision prompts, the line a client said that deserves another look next week. That notebook is what Korely becomes when you sit down with a vault. Four ways it earns its place.

• Local by default, so the most private posture is the resting state. Free Korely keeps every note, every recording, and every transcript on your encrypted disk. There is no upload step to remember to turn off. Picture the filing cabinet in your office, only smarter about finding things.
• A useful first draft from your recordings, not a clinical record. Recorded sessions get a local Whisper transcript that you re-read and refine before it becomes a session note. The output saves writing time. The clinical record stays the version you actually wrote and reviewed.
• A theme map across clients, without storing names. Tag themes the way you already do in supervision prep (attachment, performance anxiety, family of origin). The entity graph links notes that share those themes across anonymous placeholders, so a Friday supervision review takes five minutes instead of an hour.
• Encrypted cloud if and only if you choose Pro. If you decide a synced vault across devices is worth the trade-off, Pro stores the cloud copy encrypted both in transit and at rest, scoped to your account. Your password is the key, Korely cloud is the cabinet, the data inside is unreadable to anyone without the key. Free users never have this cabinet in the picture at all.