Your work stays on your computer
Workspaces, conversations and attachments live in a SQLite database you own. Here is what that rules out, and the one thing it does not.
OpenBot keeps your workspaces, conversations, attachments, browser data and team data on the computer that runs it. They go into a SQLite database in your own home directory. There is no copy on our side, because there is no place on our side to put one.
What that rules out
We cannot read your chats. We cannot hand them to anyone who asks us, because we do not hold them. If you delete the database, the conversation is gone rather than merely hidden. And the application keeps working when our servers do not: OpenBot runs without an account at all.
It also changes who is responsible for backups. Nothing is uploaded, so nothing is restored for you. That trade is the point, but it is worth knowing before you rely on it.
The one thing it does not rule out
Local-first is a claim about storage, not about the network. Your agents still talk to model providers, and whatever you send an agent reaches the provider you pointed it at. Pages you open in the built-in browser still load from the internet. Plugins can still make requests.
The honest version of the promise is narrower than the slogan: OpenBot adds no hop of its own. We wrote down exactly which data leaves your machine and why in the privacy notes.
What an account is for
You can sign in, and some things do need one: your profile and avatar, host configuration, team memberships, invitations and the logical sessions that let devices find each other. That list is deliberately short, and it is the whole of it. Chats, files and commands are not on it.
Your database stays the source of truth. The account is not a cache of your work that happens to live elsewhere; it is the small amount of shared state that two machines need in order to agree they belong to the same person.