Source documents for independent journalists: buy it once

Why a licence is a one-time purchase

A SealedBrief licence is a one-time purchase for a 3-year term, and it does not auto-renew.

SealedBrief is a local-first desktop workspace for question-and-answer over your own confidential documents. The Professional tier is a 3-year term licence priced at $499, with support in years two and three billed separately. Personal and Professional run the same software; the Professional licence adds the commercial-use grant, extra device slots, and the compliance evidence surface rather than unlocking a deliberately limited Personal build. Your SealedBrief licence follows you, not your employer — you can take it with you across job changes.

How renewing carries your vault into the new term

Renewing restores full functionality and carries your vault, settings, and device registrations into the new term — a renewal, not a reinstall.

The licence is an Ed25519-signed file that is verified offline, so activation keeps working for the rest of your term even without the vendor. The device identifier the licence check sends is a hashed 32-character fingerprint of stable machine details, not your hardware serial numbers or hostname in the clear. Crash reporting is opt-in and off by default; when you turn it on it sends a scrubbed crash report that carries no document content. SealedBrief’s models ship as standard GGUF files run through llama.cpp, so you can swap the bundled language model for another GGUF model of your choice.

How the vault opens read-only

SealedBrief keeps no escrow copy of your encryption key; if your keychain entry is lost and you kept no backup, the vault cannot be recovered.

At rest, SealedBrief stores your extracted text and metadata as ciphertext on your device. Your vault’s encryption key is created on your device and is never transmitted to SealedBrief or written into any file the app controls. If your master key is missing but an encrypted vault is still on disk, SealedBrief refuses to generate a new key and stops with an explanation, instead of silently locking you out of your own data. Your documents and your questions stay on your own machine.

Why the document work runs offline

After the first launch the document work runs offline, because the models ship inside the app and nothing is fetched at runtime.

The document engine’s lack of network access is structural: it follows from how SealedBrief’s two processes are built and guarded, not from a setting you switch on. SealedBrief treats no network egress as defense in depth: the document engine’s own code opens no connections, and a process-wide guard still blocks any that a bundled machine-learning library might attempt. SealedBrief’s build carries an automated check that fails if the document engine ever declares an outbound network endpoint. Cut your machine off the network before you index a single file, then work as normal: indexing, search, OCR, and cited answers all keep running with no connection.

What would make this the wrong purchase?

CPU-only operation works but is meaningfully slower than running on a GPU or on Apple Silicon.

SealedBrief ships today for Linux as an AppImage and for macOS on Apple Silicon as a signed, notarized build. SealedBrief runs on an NVIDIA GPU, on Apple Silicon through Metal, or on CPU. SealedBrief runs well on a 12 GB-or-larger NVIDIA GPU, with roughly 16 GB of RAM and about 15 GB of free disk. The Professional tier covers up to three devices, grants commercial use for paid client work, and adds an exportable evidence surface.

What does the trial let you check for yourself?

The free 14-day trial is the full product and needs no account and no card. Every purchase is backed by a 30-day refund, separate from the free trial.

Point SealedBrief at a folder and it keeps the index current on its own, re-indexing a file when you add or edit it. Beyond PDFs and Word files, SealedBrief indexes spreadsheets, slide decks, email files, and OpenDocument files, extracting their text on your own machine. Answers are grounded in passages retrieved from your own documents and show the source paragraphs alongside the response. Click a PDF citation and SealedBrief opens the source document at the page the answer drew from.

---

This article was drafted with AI assistance.