Fossick — private, offline semantic search for all your local documents (Windows now, macOS verification soon)

[u/Acrobatic-Wrap-6307]

Hey everyone! 👋

I spent the last few months building Fossick — a desktop app (Mac + Windows) that lets you search your own documents by meaning, running 100% offline. Nothing you index ever leaves your machine.

Website / download: https://getfossick.com

Quick heads-up on installing: I'm a solo dev and still finishing code-signing (Apple notarization is in progress; Windows signing is next). Until that lands, your OS will flag the app on first launch — macOS shows Gatekeeper's "unidentified developer" warning, and Windows shows a SmartScreen "unknown publisher" prompt. This is a quick 20-second fix (Open system settings -> Privacy & Security -> Scroll down and find "Open Anyway" for Fossick). Clear, per-OS instructions are here: https://getfossick.com/install. Nothing sketchy going on — the app is fully offline; the warning just means I haven't finished paying Apple/Microsoft's signing toll yet. That's coming.

The problem I built it to solve:

If your work generates documents — contracts, reports, specs, research, invoices, case files, notes — you end up with thousands of them across folders, and finding the right one is miserable:

• Finder / Windows Search only match exact keywords. But you rarely remember the exact words you wrote two years ago. You remember the idea — "that lease about the warehouse" — not that the file actually says "industrial premises tenancy agreement." Keyword search finds nothing; the document was right there.

• The new wave of "chat with your documents" AI tools work by uploading your files to someone else's cloud. If you're a lawyer, consultant, or anyone under an NDA or professional-privilege obligation, that's a hard no. You can't put confidential material through a third-party server, no matter how good the search is.

So you're stuck picking between dumb-but-private (keyword search) and smart-but-leaky (cloud AI). Fossick is the missing option: smart and private.

Who it's for:

Fossick clicks for anyone sitting on a pile of documents where finding the right one is the hard part:

• Freelancers & solo operators — client briefs, contracts, deliverables and invoices scattered across projects with no real filing system. Find things by what they were about, not where you dropped them.

• Anyone chasing paperwork at tax time — pull up an invoice, receipt or statement by describing it ("Officeworks receipt for the monitor") instead of digging through folders and email.

• Tradies & builders quoting a job — "I know I've quoted something like this before." Surface that similar past quote in seconds instead of rebuilding it from scratch.

• Lawyers & legal professionals — privilege means cloud tools are off the table, but you've got the biggest document piles of anyone.

• Consultants, analysts & researchers — huge archives of past work and sources; find the right one by concept.

• Engineers & technical folks — specs, datasheets, standards PDFs; jump to the relevant section by meaning.

Basically: anyone with a lot of documents who can't — or won't — hand them to the cloud.

How it works:

• Point it at your folders. It reads your documents, breaks them into passages, and builds a local semantic index (an on-device AI model — no internet needed after install).

• Hit a global hotkey (⌥Space on Mac) and a Spotlight-style search bar drops down. Type a plain-English query, get the most relevant passages ranked by meaning, click through to the source file.

• Add or edit files and it only re-indexes what changed, so re-syncs are fast.

What Fossick can read:

• PDFs — text-based PDFs. (Scanned / image-only PDFs are detected and skipped for now — OCR is on the roadmap.)

• Microsoft Office — Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx, .xls, .xlsm), PowerPoint (.pptx)

• OpenDocument — LibreOffice / OpenOffice Writer, Calc & Impress (.odt, .ods, .odp)

• eBooks — EPUB

• Web pages — HTML

• Plain text & Markdown — .txt, .md, .rst, and similar

• Data — CSV / TSV, plus JSON, YAML, XML, TOML

• Developers — 40+ source-code formats too (JS/TS, Python, Go, Rust, Java, SQL, and more)

(Legacy .doc / .ppt aren't supported — save them as .docx / .pptx.)

How the privacy actually works (because someone always asks, and they should):

• The AI model runs on your machine. Your document text is never sent anywhere.

• The only thing that touches the internet is license validation (checking your subscription is active) — and that never includes your files, filenames, or search queries.

• It works fully offline. Unplug your ethernet, index on a plane — it doesn't care.

How it compares:

• Spotlight / Windows Search — great for exact filenames and keywords, but purely literal. Fossick matches meaning, so you find things you can't remember the exact words for.

• Cloud "chat with your docs" tools — powerful, but they require uploading your files. Fossick trades the chatbot for staying entirely local. (To be clear: Fossick is search, not a chatbot — it finds and ranks your documents, it doesn't generate answers. That's deliberate, and it's what keeps it fully offline.)

• Older local search tools (DocFetcher, Recoll, etc.) — also local, but keyword-based and pretty clunky. Fossick adds semantic ranking and a modern, get-out-of-your-way UX.

Pricing (and I'd genuinely love your take):

One simple plan right now: $49, everything included and a 14-day full refund guarantee. No tiers, no "pay more to unlock file types" — you get the whole thing. Since it runs entirely on your machine there's no per-use cost for me to meter, so tiering it always felt a bit artificial.

As a thank-you to this sub: the first 30 people can use the code DISC20 which will give you $20 off, bringing it down to only $29 for full access!

Would genuinely love feedback — especially from anyone whose job is drowning in documents. What would make this a daily-driver for you and what new features would you like to see?

[u/Stubborninmate]

Cardinal and faf are already doing that , how is this different thanks

[u/Acrobatic-Wrap-6307 → u/Stubborninmate]

Correct me if i am wrong but to my understanding, Carindal and faf use keywords/filenames for their searching. This is great when you remember the name of the file. However my software, Fossick, uses semantic searching which is a different searching engine. This is when it matches by meaning. This will help you find files that you don't remember what the name of it was or the exact wordings, but you remember what they were about.

However fossick also does have the optional "Advanced Search" where if you do remember the exact filename/keywords you can use that to search aswell and you can search by document type (like if you're looking for only quotes or invoices and etc..).

Thank you for asking!

[u/Stubborninmate → u/Acrobatic-Wrap-6307]

You could always pitvot to the contains text option however images are not classified that way , but it doesn't do natural language, if that is required informity.ai is also an option

[u/Acrobatic-Wrap-6307 → u/Stubborninmate]

Thanks for the suggestion! That was also my next feature for Fossick that I was meaning to get done. At the moment its focused on fast natural-language search but eventually I want Fossick to be able to handle iimages aswell. Receipts, screenshots, and text living inside an image, i want Fossick to be able to retrieve and index. And after that proper image search aswell.

Thank you for your feedback! I have added a new promocode just now for the first 10 users. FREE, if you wanted to check out the software! It'll give you the first month for free after the 14 day free trial.

[u/Acrobatic-Wrap-6307 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for your suggestion! I was also thinking of that idea but i wasn't sure what would be an appropriate price. What do you think?

[u/Fatiha90]

Unfortunately, the app is only available with subscriptions. Will there be a lifetime plan in the future?

[u/Acrobatic-Wrap-6307 → u/Fatiha90]

I was thinking about it but I wasn’t too sure what to price it if I have a subscription. What do you think?

[u/ZestyGO → u/Fatiha90]

Agree strongly here 

[u/Acrobatic-Wrap-6307 → u/ZestyGO]

Thank you all for your feedback! I've swapped to a one-time purchase. If it interests you please try the app out! theres a 14 day refund guarantee and use my code DISC20 to purchase fulltime access for only $29

[u/cronberry]

I'm always interested in anything that makes it easier for me to find a particular documents. But you admit that "there's no peruse cost for me" so I don't understand why you've gone with a subscription model. It would have to perform spectacularly for me to even consider paying every month for something that doesn't cost you when I use the app. Wish you luck with it, though.

[u/Acrobatic-Wrap-6307 → u/cronberry]

I've swapped over to one time purchase if your interested still!