Privacy first
Private is a claim. This is the part you can check.
Every meeting-notes tool on the market says it takes your privacy seriously. Most of them mean their servers are well run. Stillnote means something narrower and more useful: your meeting audio, your transcripts, and your notes stay on your Mac, and the app will show you its own network activity while you record so you do not have to believe us.
What on-device actually means here
The phrase gets stretched, so here is ours without the stretch. When you record a meeting in Stillnote, the audio is captured by your Mac, transcribed by a speech model running on your Mac, separated into speakers on your Mac, and summarized by a language model running on your Mac. At no point in that sequence does your conversation cross the network. It is not encrypted in transit to us and deleted after processing. It never goes.
The times Stillnote does touch the network, all of them
A privacy page that claims an app never talks to the internet is either lying or describing something that cannot update itself. Stillnote does make network calls. Here is the complete list, and the thing they have in common is that none of them carries your meeting.
You do not have to take that list on faith either, which is the point of the next section.
How to prove it yourself in about two minutes
This is the test we would run if we were you, and it costs nothing but a meeting you were having anyway.
- Open the network meter while you record. It sits in the app and in the menu bar and moves in real time, and its ledger names what each piece of traffic was for and which host it went to.
- Then turn your wifi off completely and record a meeting. The transcript still appears live and the summary still arrives a few seconds after you stop, because none of that work was ever happening somewhere else.
- Check the app you installed is the one we built: run spctl --assess --verbose and stapler validate against the downloaded file. macOS already does this before it will open the app, but you can do it yourself.
- Read the privacy policy and the sub-processor list rather than this page. This page is the argument; those are the commitments.
What we give up to do it this way
Keeping everything local is a real trade and pretending otherwise would undercut the whole point of this page. Stillnote runs on Apple Silicon Macs only, because it needs the local hardware to do the work, so there is no Windows build, no Linux build, no web app, and no phone app. The first launch has to download the models, so it is the one moment the app needs the internet and it is not instant. Support cannot look inside your account to diagnose a problem, because there is no account of yours holding your meetings, which means we need you to describe what went wrong. And the transcript quality is whatever a model running on your laptop can do, with no cloud model to quietly fall back to on a hard recording.
We think that is the right side of the trade for anyone whose meetings involve a client, a patient, a candidate, a term sheet, or a settlement. If your meetings are not sensitive and you want it on every device you own, a cloud notetaker is genuinely a reasonable choice and we would rather tell you that than sell you the wrong thing.
The questions careful people ask
How do I verify the on-device claim myself, rather than taking your word for it?
Open the network meter in the app while you record. It shows Stillnote's own network activity live, in the window and in the menu bar, and it keeps a ledger that labels each piece of traffic with what it was for and which host it went to. Then do the harder test: turn off your wifi entirely and record a meeting. Transcription and the summary still run, because they were never leaving in the first place.
What does the network meter actually count?
Every deliberate network call the app makes is labelled at the point it is made, with a purpose and the endpoint host, and the ledger stores the host only, never a full URL or anything from your meeting. Anything the app observes that is not covered by a labelled call is flagged as unlabelled traffic, and we treat an unlabelled row as a bug in Stillnote rather than as normal background noise. The meter is built to be able to embarrass us, which is the only kind of meter worth showing you.
Is my meeting audio ever uploaded if the local model struggles?
No. There is no cloud fallback and no quality escape hatch that ships your audio somewhere else when the local model finds a recording hard. If the transcription is imperfect, it is imperfect on your Mac. We would rather give you a worse transcript than a broken promise.
Where are the recordings and notes stored, and can I delete them?
In application data on your own Mac. You can delete an individual meeting, and Settings has a Recording section that lists every audio file still on disk with per-file and select-all deletion, plus an optional retention period after which recordings are removed automatically. It is off by default, because deleting your data without being asked is not our call to make.
Do the other people in the meeting need to consent?
That depends on where you and they are, and it is your call, not ours. Recording laws differ by province, state, and country, and some are two-party consent. Stillnote is a note-taking tool and not a compliance program, so the obligation to get consent where it is required stays with you.
How do I know the app I downloaded is the one you built?
The Mac build is signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate belonging to LeapVision Technologies Inc. and is notarized by Apple, which means Apple scanned it and issued a ticket that is stapled into the download. macOS checks that before it will open the app, and you can check it yourself on the downloaded file with spctl --assess --verbose and stapler validate in Terminal.
What about the anonymous usage data I read about in the privacy policy?
It is optional, off unless you turn it on, and it is a fixed list of event names with no content in them. There is no free-text field, so nothing you or anyone else said in a meeting can end up in it even by accident. The privacy policy describes it in full and it is worth reading rather than trusting this summary.
Who else touches my data?
For your meetings, nobody, because they do not leave your Mac. For the optional account and billing paths there are named sub-processors, and we publish the list rather than making you ask for it.
Try it on a real meeting
The fastest way to settle whether this is true is one meeting with the network meter open. Stillnote is free for 5 enhanced notes a month with no credit card, and nothing you record leaves your Mac.
Native macOS app (Apple Silicon).
Related pages
Stillnote is a native macOS app for Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 13 or later, made by LeapVision Technologies Inc. Recording, transcription, and summarization run on your device; optional features such as sign-in, billing, calendar connection, model download, and update checks do use the network, as described above. AI-generated transcripts and summaries can contain errors and are not a certified record. Recording-consent law varies by jurisdiction and complying with it remains your responsibility. Nothing on this page is legal advice.