The garden

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 in the place it grows; it never sends the sunlight away to be processed. Pulse Local works on your money where your money lives, on your machine.

A single green leaf on a thin branch, with a pale sun behind it shining through its veins.

Privacy

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, and none of that asks for our permission or our server.

A stone garden wall seen from inside, with an arched wooden gate and an iron key hanging on the inside of the gate, beside a young tree and terracotta pots.

Open weights

Open weights are heirloom seeds.

Heirloom seeds are saved and passed on. Anyone can plant them, grow them and keep seed for next year, and nobody can take the harvest back. The model inside Pulse Local is grown the same way: its weights are public, under Apache 2.0.

So anyone can read what runs on their machine before they run it, and it keeps running whatever happens to us.

The model on Hugging Face

One hand passing a small paper seed packet to another open hand over a wooden table, with seeds spilled beside an envelope and a seedling in a pot.

Small models

Small things, well supported.

A young vine does not need to be big to grow straight. It needs a trellis. The model in Pulse Local is small, 0.6B parameters, so it fits on your machine; what makes it reliable is the structure built around it.

Code answers four questions in five before the model sees them, and every answer passes a guard that describes your money and never tells you what to do with it.

How the harness works

A young vine climbing straight up a bamboo trellis tied with twine, leaning against an old stone wall.

Nothing leaves

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.

Pulse Local keeps what it learns about your money in your garden: your imports, your rules, your questions. There is no telemetry, no analytics and no training on what you ask, because there is nowhere for it to go.

A small tree over a cross-section of the ground, where fallen leaves darken into layers of soil that its roots reach into, beside a new sprout.

Motion

Nature keeps the pace.

Nothing on our pages bounces. The tree on the front page bends from its trunk in one shared wind, and every leaf that falls is simulated with 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 so it can be watched, pauses when you look away, and stops for anyone whose 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). The faint leaves mark where it was every twentieth of a second of its fall. Tap for another leaf.

The system

One leaf, two papers, three typefaces.

Everything above, reduced to what a designer needs to keep it true.

The mark

Pulse Local

One leaf, one line: a 1.75 stroke on a 24-unit grid, round ends, no fill, in a single 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 into a gradient that ends in the page’s own colour, so the art and the page 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.

Get the app How we built it

A leaf does its workwhere it grows.