Bring the data home.

Reclaim Our Data champions desktop software that stores your data where you can see it, and the developers with the conviction to build that way.

What we believe

Somewhere along the way, software stopped running on your computer and started running on someone else’s. A word processor became an account. A notebook became a subscription. Your files became rows in a database you cannot inspect, in a jurisdiction you did not choose, guarded by people you will never meet.

The consequences arrive as headlines. Records exposed, credentials dumped, health data traded. But a breach is only the visible failure of a decision made much earlier: to collect the data at all, and to keep it somewhere central, where taking it once takes everything.

Our theory of change

We are not going to litigate every broker out of existence. What we can do is make the alternative visible and make the promise legible. Developers who keep data local get a badge, a listing, and an audience of people who care. People looking for software get somewhere to find them.

Every application that stores its data on a user’s own machine is a dataset that never gets aggregated, never gets sold, and never appears in a breach notification. Multiply that by enough software and the problem gets structurally smaller. That is the whole strategy.

What the badge is worth

Exactly as much as its enforcement. The pledge is self-attested. We do not read anyone’s source code and we will never claim otherwise. What we guarantee is that the promise is public, that it is dated, that it names the precise wording agreed to, and that breaking it is recorded permanently rather than quietly erased. A badge that could not be revoked would be worth nothing, and would lend our credibility to whoever abused it first.

How we are funded

By the community, and by nobody else. We take no money from data brokers, from ad-tech, or from any company whose business depends on the thing we are arguing against. That rules out most of the money in software, which is the point.

Donations from the people who use and build local-first software will pay for the directory, the infrastructure we own, and the work of keeping the pledge honest. We are not accepting them yet.