Choosing Your Privacy Model: Local vs. BYOK vs. PRO

At Escribolt, we believe that security is a structural design decision. Instead of locking you into a single cloud ecosystem, Escribolt supports three distinct operational profiles: Local, BYOK, and PRO. This guide breaks down the differences so you can select the right trust boundary for your workload.

1. Local Mode: Absolute Privacy

How it works: All speech models, language models, and storage tables run directly on your Mac. No network requests are made, and no telemetry is gathered.

Best for: Defense contractors, healthcare professionals handling patient audio, developers working with confidential IP, or users who want free offline performance.

Trade-off: Requires a modern processor (Apple Silicon recommended) and uses local battery and RAM resources.

2. BYOK Mode: API Control

How it works: Your notebook metadata and sync tables are saved locally in SQLite, but speech transcription and AI reasoning are routed to your personal API accounts (Deepgram, OpenAI, Groq, Anthropic, or Gemini) using keys stored in your secure Keychain.

Best for: Developers, power users who want model flexibility (e.g. swapping between Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Gemini 2.0 Flash), and teams who already have corporate API agreements in place.

Trade-off: You must configure and fund your own API keys, but you only pay raw token costs without any markup.

3. PRO Mode: Speed and Convenience

How it works: Managed cloud servers route your speech and reasoning actions seamlessly, requiring zero API setup or local processing power. Your files sync automatically across your devices.

Best for: Creators, busy professionals, and anyone who wants high-speed cloud acceleration and seamless cross-device synchronization.

The "Strict Privacy" Override: Pro users can toggle "Strict Privacy Mode" directly in settings. This forces new notes or recordings to remain locally on-device, bypassing the cloud sync queue entirely—giving you Pro convenience with Local protection on a per-file basis.

Summary Comparison