Who made this

Berlin, Germany

Hi, I’m Onat. I built BeaconFind on my own, over about four months, in Berlin. It is the first product I have taken all the way from an idea to something people pay for, and I care about it more than is probably reasonable.

It started as my own problem. I had thousands of files across a messy drive, contracts, scans, screenshots, photos, code, in more than one language, and the search built into Windows could only find them if I remembered the exact name. I wanted to search by what a file was about. And I did not want to upload my whole life to someone’s server to do it.

Private by architecture, not by promise

That second part is the whole design. Every AI model runs on your own PC. Your files, their contents, your searches and your index never leave the machine. The app only ever makes two network calls, a licence check and an update check, and you can block both at your firewall and it keeps working. That is not a privacy policy you have to trust. It is how the thing is put together, and you can verify it yourself.

Built carefully, on purpose

A one-person app that you trust with every file on your disk has to be built with more discipline than its size suggests, not less. So the project runs on a rule I hold myself to on every change, including the small ones:

That is one line from a long internal document I actually follow: map what a change can touch before shipping it, attack my own conclusions before trusting them, and run the real thing rather than assume. It is why a critical bug gets a fix and a guard that stops the whole class of bug from coming back, and why releases go out signed and verified rather than hoped-for.

Where it’s going

BeaconFind is Windows-first today. macOS and Linux are on the roadmap, and so is broader hardware support so the AI runs well whether or not you have a dedicated GPU. If you have thoughts, or you just want to tell me it broke, I read every email: [email protected].

More

• Changelog: what has shipped, and when.
• How it compares, and when you might not need it.
• Privacy policy: the full detail on the two network calls.