A privacy-first mac dashboard with no account, ever

Most "dashboards" are really data pipelines pointed at someone else's server: you sign up, you sync, and your day quietly becomes their telemetry. Orbl is a privacy-first mac dashboard that breaks that pattern — it's 100% local, with no account, no server, and no analytics. What your desktop knows, your Mac knows. That's the entire list.

What "100% local" actually means

It's an easy phrase to print and a hard one to keep. Here's how Orbl keeps it:

• No account. There's nothing to sign up for. You download the app and it works — no email, no login, no profile sitting in a database somewhere.
• No server in the loop. Orbl runs entirely on your machine. When a widget needs data from a provider, your Mac talks to that provider directly; nothing routes through us.
• No analytics. We don't track usage, sessions, or behavior. There's no telemetry to opt out of because there's none to begin with.
• Read-only keys in the Keychain. Any API keys you add — for weather, GitHub, or revenue integrations — are stored read-only in the macOS Keychain, the same vault macOS uses for your passwords.

The full details live on the privacy page, and the reasoning behind the architecture is in why I made my Mac dashboard local.

Permissions asked lazily, not up front

A privacy-first tool shouldn't open with a wall of permission prompts. Orbl asks for what it needs, only when it needs it:

• Location is requested the moment you add weather or air quality — not before.
• Calendar and Reminders are asked only when you enable meetings or tasks.
• Accessibility comes up only for the rhythm features that read app switches and keystrokes locally.

If you never turn a widget on, the matching permission is never requested. You stay in control of the blast radius, widget by widget. And everything those permissions feed — your focus rhythm, your screen time, your calendar — is computed on-device and shown on your live wallpaper dashboard, never uploaded.

The contrast with cloud dashboards

Cloud dashboards trade your privacy for convenience and call it a feature. To show you a number, they often need a copy of the data behind it — sitting on their servers, governed by their retention policy, exposed to their next breach. A local app removes that whole category of risk:

• There's no central database of your metrics to leak.
• There's no third party deciding how long to keep your history.
• There's no account to compromise, because there isn't one.

This matters most for exactly the people who care: founders watching revenue, developers wiring in API keys, anyone who'd rather their day not become a row in someone's table. Orbl shows you Stripe MRR or GitHub activity by talking to those services from your Mac — the keys stay in your Keychain, the calls leave from your machine, and the result lands on your wallpaper.

Calm and quiet, technically too

Privacy and a light footprint tend to travel together. With no server and no telemetry, Orbl has less to do: ~0% CPU at rest, under 100MB of RAM, an adaptive 8–12fps, and zero servers behind it. Your dashboard is just... yours.

Try it free

The core Orbl app is free, and even Premium — a one-time license, lifetime, no subscription — keeps the same local-only promise. Read-only keys, no account, no analytics, for the whole app.

If you want a dashboard that owes nothing to the cloud, start here. Download Orbl and see the pricing.