Unified personal knowledge search across email and files

C5/10April 3, 2026

WhatA local-first AI search tool that indexes your email, documents, and PDFs and lets you query your personal knowledge base using free or local LLMs.

SignalNon-technical knowledge workers are explicitly asking for a simple, free, privacy-respecting way to search across their scattered personal information using AI, and existing solutions like Onyx are still too complex or enterprise-focused for individual users.

Why NowLocal LLMs via Ollama and free-tier cloud models like Gemini have reached the quality threshold where they can do useful retrieval and summarization, making a viable product possible without expensive API costs.

MarketIndividual knowledge workers and small teams; tens of millions of potential users. Competes with Notion AI, Apple Intelligence search, and Onyx, but none nail the simple local-first personal search use case well.

MoatLocal-first data creates a personal index that gets more valuable over time; network effects are weak but switching costs are high once someone's entire knowledge base is indexed.

We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant View discussion ↗ · Article ↗ · 344 pts · April 3, 2026

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