Some memory should never leave the building.
Legal matters, deal terms, anything under NDA. The free plan is not a trial of the cloud product — it is the product, minus the cloud.
The position, stated plainly
Most memory products are somebody else's server wearing a friendly interface. For privileged or regulated work that is not a feature trade-off — it is a threshold question. Varven's answer is structural: on the Local plan, your memory is a folder of Markdown on one machine you control. The model that sorts and tags it runs on your hardware. Search is answered on the machine. There is no cloud copy, because you have not created one.
What that means concretely
- Your files, readable without us. Plain Markdown in a folder you choose. Open it in any editor, back it up under your existing procedures, put it inside an encrypted volume if that is your policy. Walking away requires no export, because nothing is locked.
- The judgment happens locally. Tagging, linking, contradiction flags — a small language model on your own hardware does that work. Nothing leaves the machine to make those calls.
- No replica to subpoena, breach, or audit. The Local plan has no cloud component. A copy that does not exist has no threat model.
The honest part
If you do choose a paid plan, the cloud replica is readable by our servers — that is what makes it searchable while your machine is off, and we would rather say so plainly than imply otherwise. Server-side semantic search and end-to-end encryption are not compatible with current technology, and we decline to pretend they are. The security page lists what is built and, just as explicitly, what is not. Varven does not train models on your content on any plan.
For confidential work, our actual recommendation is the one that pays us nothing: stay on Local.
If you leave, or if you cancel
The vault was never ours to withhold. Cancel a paid plan and the app keeps working on the free tier with your files untouched; the replica becomes inaccessible and is deleted after 30 days. Stop using Varven entirely and you still have a folder of Markdown that reads fine in ten years.
Which plan this needs
This use case is the free plan on purpose. Add a paid plan only for memory you are comfortable having a readable cloud copy of — plenty of people keep one vault Local and pay for convenience elsewhere in their life, and that is the system working as intended.
Questions
Is the free plan actually the full product?
Yes — no memory cap, no trial clock, full retrieval quality. What it lacks is the cloud replica, which for this page's readers is the point.
Why not end-to-end encrypt the replica?
Because we will not claim it before it is true. A server cannot semantically search text it cannot read, so today the choice is honest: readable replica, or no replica. End-to-end encrypted sync is on the roadmap, and this page will change when it ships — not before.
Does Varven train on my content?
No. Your content is your record, not our training data.