Local-first, by design
Your money lives on your computer — not in someone’s cloud.
GlidePath Money is a desktop app. Your financial file is a folder of plain files on your own machine, and the planning math runs there too. There’s no bank-login vault and no cloud copy of your transactions — so your financial history isn’t sitting in a central database waiting to be breached.
What “local-first” honestly means.
It doesn’t mean nothing ever touches the internet. It means your financial file stays local by default. Two calls are required — a license check and an update check — and every other cloud feature is one you turn on, each scoped to exactly what it needs.
A finance app shouldn’t promise total isolation it can’t keep. So here’s the honest line drawn down the middle — what stays on your machine, and what leaves only when you choose it.
Stays on your machine
Your transactions, balances, accounts, holdings, and the whole planning engine — net worth, retirement Monte Carlo (your plan run across hundreds of market paths), taxes, debt cliffs. Importing a CSV or using the extension doesn’t send your data to us.
What leaves — and what it sends
Two calls are required: a license check (your key + a device id, to confirm your purchase) and an update check (just the app version). Everything else is opt-in — the AI helper (your typed question + the page name, never your balances or accounts), AI categorize (a transaction’s payee, amount, date and type — not account names or balances), a price refresh (only the ticker symbols you hold), phone access (proxies your dashboard, passing it through without storing it), and a beta email intake (parses bank-alert emails you forward). See exactly what each sends →
Always yours to inspect
Because the file is plain and local, you can open it, back it up, export it, and move it. You’re never locked behind a vendor’s account-connection layer to keep your own history useful.
Local-first extends to the OS, too: GlidePath runs natively on Windows and Linux (.deb and universal tarball). Get the Linux build →
Why the default matters.
Most finance apps route through an aggregator like Plaid: depending on the bank, it receives your credentials or an access token, and your transaction history is processed on its servers. That’s two companies you’re trusting not to be breached or to quietly monetize what they see. Local-first flips the question from “which accounts can this service reach?” to “which files did I bring in, and what did the app do with them?” — a question you can actually answer. See exactly what leaves and when →
The honest tradeoff.
No aggregator means no fully-automatic background sync. You capture transactions with a one-click browser extension or a CSV every week or two. A little more hands-on — and a calm ten-minute monthly check-in tends to be the part that actually changes how you handle money, not a feed you stop noticing.
Local-first, and a full planner.
$129 one-time for Personal, $199 for Personal + Business. Your financial file stays local by default — and you still get retirement, tax, debt, equity, and business planning, with every major number explained in plain English.
GlidePath shows you the math — for your specific situation, talk to a fiduciary advisor or CPA.