A leaf does its work
where it grows.
Pulse Local’s mark is a leaf, and its world is a walled garden.
Both say what the software does. A leaf turns light into food where it grows, and never sends the sunlight away to be processed. Pulse Local does its work on your machine, where your ledger is.
A walled garden, turned around.
In technology, a walled garden belongs to a company. The wall keeps you in, and the key is theirs. Ours faces the other way. The wall keeps everyone else out, and the key hangs on your side of the gate.
Your ledger is a file on your disk. You can copy it, export it or delete it without asking us or our server.
Open weights are heirloom seeds.
Heirloom seeds are saved and passed on. Anyone can plant them and keep seed for next year, and nobody can take the harvest back. The two language models in Pulse Local are shared the same way, with public weights under Apache 2.0.
You can check what runs on your machine before you run it, and it keeps running whatever happens to us.
Small things, well supported.
A young vine does not need to be big to grow straight. It needs a trellis. The two models in Pulse Local are small, 397 MB each, so they fit on your machine. What makes them reliable is the structure around them.
Pulse's own code works out the answer to four questions in five, and the chat model answers the rest. For every money question, a second small model reads the question too, and a figure appears only when its reading and the code's agree. And every answer passes a guard that lets it describe your money, never tell you what to do with it.
How Pulse works
What falls feeds the same ground.
In a garden, fallen leaves become the soil the same tree grows from. Nothing is carried off to feed another field.
What Pulse Local learns about your money stays in your garden: your imports, your rules, your questions. No telemetry, no analytics, no training on what you ask. The app sends none of it anywhere.
Nature keeps the pace.
Nothing on our pages bounces. The tree on the front page bends from its trunk in one shared wind. Every falling leaf follows the equations physicists use for falling plates, so it stalls, flips and glides like a real one.
Motion is physics or nothing. It runs slower than life, pauses when you look away, and stops if your system asks for less motion.
One leaf in still air, simulated live at a fifth of real speed with the falling-plate model of Andersen, Pesavento and Wang (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2005). Each faint leaf marks where it was, every twentieth of a second. Tap for another leaf.
One leaf, two papers, three typefaces.
Everything above, as the rules a designer needs to keep it true.
The mark
One leaf in one line: a 1.75 stroke on a 24-unit grid, round ends, no fill, one colour. Ink in the app, leaf green on the page. It also answers our headline, budgeting that never leaves your machine. It is the leaf that stays.
Two papers
The page, in daylight
Paper
#F5F7FA
Ink
#0A1420
Leaf
#22B8AA
Leaf, for words
#0F7F76
The garden, on warm paper
Paper
#EFE7D8
Ink
#241F18
Sage
#858A67
Terracotta
#C48D69
Where they meet, the garden’s paper is re-lit to fade into the page’s own colour, so the two join without a seam.
Three typefaces
Never leaves your machine.
Outfit, light and large, for the lines we want remembered.
A complete budgeting app, built so your data stays yours.
Figtree, for everything you read.
Your questions · Never
JetBrains Mono, for labels and figures, like a ledger.
Pictures
- Hand-drawn ink on warm paper, flat fills, no gradients, no 3D.
- One idea to a plate, with room around it.
- Objects and hands, never screens.
- No words or numbers inside a picture. A figure is set in type, where it can be read and corrected.
Motion
- Physics or nothing. No bounces, no confetti, no particles.
- One wind for everything that moves.
- Slower than life, so it can be watched.
- Pauses when you look away, and stops for anyone who asks for less motion.
Voice
- Short sentences. One idea at a time.
- Your machine, never a brand of machine.
- We describe your money. We never tell you what to do with it.
- Say what leaves, and when. Everything else stays.
Not your machine, not your data.™
Pulse Local keeps your ledger and your questions on yours.