Local-first knowledge engine · Windows
Answers from your documents. Nothing leaves your machine by default.
Motekai Retriever reads your notes and files, finds the passages that matter, and answers in plain language, with a citation on every claim. No account, no subscription, and a local model out of the box. Connect your own cloud key if you prefer, and your documents are still indexed and searched on your PC.
Windows 10/11 · signed installer · full-featured trial, no card needed
Most assistants answer from memory, and sometimes they guess. Motekai opens your filing cabinet first — it only answers from what it can actually find in your documents.
Updates
What's new
- v0.3.20
One companion, three states
An orb in the corner of your screen. Ask, get a cited answer, carry on.
- v0.3.20
Four things worth knowing
What it reads, what it does when it cannot find something, and what gets indexed.
Follow a question
From your words to a cited answer
Watch one question travel through the system, all of it on your own machine.
You ask in plain language
No keywords, no syntax. Ask the way you'd ask a colleague.
“What's our refund window?”
Your question becomes a fingerprint
It's turned into numbers that capture meaning, so a match can be found even when the words are different.
Under the hoodAn embedding model maps the question into a vector.
Motekai searches your knowledge
That fingerprint is compared against every passage in your documents, and the closest matches are pulled out.
Under the hoodNearest-neighbour search over a vector index, then a reranker re-sorts the top hits for precision.
The best passages become context
Only the most relevant pages are handed to the language model to read, nothing else.
Under the hoodThe retrieved passages are placed in the prompt as the model's only source.
It writes a grounded, cited answer
The model answers using only those passages, and marks each claim with a citation you can open and check.
Under the hoodEach claim is scored against the passage behind it, and the score travels with the answer. When retrieval finds nothing to work from, the answer is a refusal rather than a guess.
Why you can trust the answer
Grounded by construction.
Grounded, not invented
Answers come from your documents and nothing else. Every claim is checked against the passages behind it and scored, and when the search turns up nothing, Motekai says so rather than guess.
Cited to your sources
Every claim carries a citation back to the exact document it came from, so you can verify the answer in one click.
Runs on your machine
Your documents stay local. Out of the box the models run on your own PC, so nothing is uploaded to a third party. Connect your own cloud key and only your question and the passages it matched are sent.
Before you download
System requirements
- Operating system
- Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. The installer is code-signed. macOS and Linux aren't supported yet.
- Memory
- 16 GB RAM recommended. Setup reads your memory and picks for you: above 8 GB you get the full model, at 8 GB or below it switches to a lighter one and says so on screen. Answers stay grounded and cited either way, just from a smaller model.
- Disk space
- The installer is about 270 MB to download. On first run the app downloads its local AI engine, the models and the reranker weights (several GB more, each checksum-verified). Plan for roughly 8 GB free in total.
- Internet
- Needed once, for the first-run model download. After that the default setup works fully offline. When it is online, the app also checks for updates and for revoked licence keys; neither check sends anything about you or your documents, and offline they quietly fail. A cloud model, if you pick one at setup, needs a connection to answer.
- GPU
- Not required. Answers come from a local model running on your CPU; a supported GPU makes them faster.
Honest note: local AI is compute-hungry. On older hardware, answers take longer, the free trial is the right way to find out how it feels on your machine before paying anything.
One-time purchase
Buy it once. It's yours.
Free trial
€0
- The complete app, fully featured for 14 days, with nothing held back
- No account, no card, no sign-up
- It never quietly gives you worse answers. What you run is the full app, at full quality
The trial download is the same signed build as the paid app.
Personal licence
€99 €149
- One payment, no subscription, ever
- Licence key by email, verified offline inside the app
- Licensed per person, for the machines you use yourself
Checkout isn't live yet. Download the free trial now, or email us to be notified when purchasing opens.
Questions
Frequently asked
On the default setup, nowhere. Indexing, search, and answering all happen on your PC with local models, your documents and questions are never uploaded, and there's no account or telemetry. The only things the app ever downloads are its own engine and models (first run), its updates, and the public list of revoked licence keys. Choosing a cloud model at setup changes the answering step only, and only for the passages a question matched, see below.
Yes, on the default setup. The first run needs an internet connection to download the local AI engine and models. After that, everything, indexing, answering, even the licence check, works fully offline. There is no activation server: your key is checked on your PC. When it is online, the app fetches two small public files from our release server, at most once an hour: a note of the newest version and the list of revoked licence keys. Those requests carry no key, no documents, no questions and no machine ID, and if they fail the app carries on. A cloud model is the one exception, and it is an explicit choice at setup.
No, it's the full product for 14 days, the same signed build throughout. When the trial ends the app stops taking new questions and points you at us — get in touch about a licence for continued use and your index and settings are waiting where you left them. It never switches to a worse model or quietly degrades its answers.
Yes, as an explicit choice at setup. The default is fully private, everything runs on your PC. The setup wizard also takes your own key for Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, AWS Bedrock, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint you point it at. Either way your documents are still indexed and searched locally; only your questions and the short passages they match are sent to your own provider account.
Not yet, Motekai Retriever launches Windows-first, and we'd rather say that plainly than hide it. macOS is the next platform on the list; no date promised until it's real.
Ask your own documents.
Free for 14 days, full-featured, offline after the first run. If it earns its keep, buy it once.