What it is. Checked Off stores your data in a database on your device. Not in a cloud account, not on Checked Off’s servers - on your phone, your laptop, your desktop. The core app works without an internet connection. Optional sync across devices is planned for a future release; you’ll decide whether to turn it on and where your data goes when you do.
This is a positioning choice, not a research-backed one. But it is worth naming directly, because the productivity software industry has spent a decade training users to accept the opposite default, and the opposite default is not actually in the user’s interest.
The problem it solves. The standard productivity tool is a cloud service with a mobile and web client. Your data lives on the company’s infrastructure. You access it through their app. This works beautifully until it doesn’t - and the history of productivity software is a history of “doesn’t.” Evernote degraded for years while millions of users’ notes sat inside it. Wunderlist was acquired by Microsoft and shut down. Google Reader was killed. Roam Research’s pricing and direction shifted under users who had invested years of work. When your productivity system lives on someone else’s server, you are a tenant. The lease terms are subject to change, and your alternatives when they change are limited.
For a tool that is supposed to hold your intentions, your projects, and your sense of what you’re doing with your life, tenancy is the wrong default.
The positioning. There is a large and loyal user segment that specifically cares about data ownership. These are people who have been burned by platform decay or acquisition, people who have read enough of the history to see the pattern, and people who want their tools to outlast the companies that built them. They are not a niche. They are the users who form the most durable relationship with a tool when the tool respects this.
Checked Off takes this position. Your tasks, projects, routines, and history are yours. They live in a file format you can read, on a device you own. The app is a way of interacting with that data. If Checked Off goes away, your data does not. If our pricing changes, you can leave without losing anything. If we are acquired, the database on your device is unaffected. Optional sync, when it ships, will be a service we provide; it will not be a dependency we create.
This is not the easiest architecture to build - cross-platform local-first sync is genuinely hard. But the positioning choice it represents is deliberate, and it matters. A productivity tool that asks to hold your intentions for the long term has to earn trust at the data-ownership level, not just the interface one.