Your data lives in your browser. It says so on the home page, and the first reply is usually: what happens when I change computers.
Here is the bill.
What we gave up
Accounts. You install it and it works. No signup, no email verification. The upside is no friction. The cost is that we don't know who you are and can't recover your data on a new machine.
Cloud sync. Highlights and drafts stay local. New laptop, they don't come with you.
Usage data. We can't see how many highlights you have, how much you have written, which feature you actually use. Product decisions run on interviews and guesswork.
Collaboration. Two people can't share one highlight library.
Any one of those would be a bullet on a competitor's feature list.
What we got back
Free users cost us nothing to serve. That is what makes a real free tier possible instead of a demo that expires.
There is no database to leak. We don't hold your drafts, so there is no breach to disclose. Not a policy. An architecture.
It works offline. On a plane, on an internal network.
The promise is a description, not a commitment. "Your notes are yours" is something a cloud product has to back with a contract. Here it is just how the thing is built.
Where the line sits
We are not against sync. When it becomes the thing standing between a user and the product, we will build it, as an option. Local by default, sync only if you turn it on, keys on your side.
It isn't built yet because most people's problem is not "I need the same highlights on three devices". It is "I have five hundred highlights and I can't recall a single one".
Solve those in the wrong order and the extra features don't matter.
Related: Why the trial is 14 days, not 7 · Eleven versions of one yellow highlight