Privacy-First ADHD Apps: No Account, No Cloud, Nothing Leaves Your Mac

Before an ADHD app has helped you with anything, most of them want an email address. Then a password. Then permission to sync. And somewhere in that flow, a fairly intimate record of your worst days starts living on someone else's computer.

Look at what an ADHD app actually ends up holding

Take the things these tools are for. A medication tracker holds what you take and when you forgot. A focus timer holds every session you bailed out of at four minutes. A mood or energy tracker holds your bad weeks in a neat chart. An end-of-day brain dump holds the unfiltered list of everything you're behind on, typed at 11pm with no editing.

Any one of those is a small thing. Together, sitting in one account, they're a detailed longitudinal record of a diagnosis, a treatment, and how well both are going. That's not "productivity data." You'd think twice before emailing it to a colleague, and it deserves the same second thought before it's uploaded to a company whose business model you've never read.

None of this requires assuming bad intent. Companies get acquired, change privacy policies, get breached, or shut down and sell the asset — and the asset is the database. The question worth asking isn't whether you trust them today. It's whether the data needs to exist on their side at all.

"We take your privacy seriously" is a promise, not a mechanism

A privacy policy describes what a company intends to do with data it already has. It's a promise, and it can be revised — usually with an email you'll skim once. Encryption in transit means the data is protected on its way to a server that still ends up holding it. Neither is architecture; both are policy.

There's a stronger guarantee available, and it's boring: the data never leaves the device, so there's nothing to leak, sell, subpoena, or lose in an acquisition. It isn't a promise about future behaviour. It's a property of how the software is built. If an app has no network code, no amount of policy change can start uploading your history next quarter.

The catch is that it's a real constraint, not a marketing line. No cloud sync between your phone and laptop. No web dashboard. No "restore my history" if you wipe the machine without exporting. Those are genuine tradeoffs, and they're the price of the guarantee — worth naming plainly rather than pretending the local-only approach is free.

What local-only looks like in practice

Squirrel is 38 small Mac apps built to that constraint. There's no sign-up screen, because there's no account to sign into. Nothing you type is transmitted anywhere: your entries live either in the app's own local storage or in a plain file at ~/Library/Application Support/Squirrel that you can open, read, back up, or delete yourself. No analytics, no crash reporting, no cookies, no third-party SDK riding along.

Four of the apps do read a sliver of system context, and it's worth being specific about which and what. FocusJail sees which app is frontmost, so it knows when you've wandered off — never anything inside that app. Surfacing reads system idle time, so it knows how long you've been heads-down — not what you were doing. BoringRedirect reads the active browser tab URL, to decide whether a doom-domain gets rerouted — never the page contents. Waypoint records the app name, tab URL, and window title when you press its hotkey, so you can find your way back — never the document text. All four are gated behind macOS Accessibility or Automation permissions that you grant on first run and can revoke any time in System Settings.

That claim is checked mechanically rather than asserted. A script in the repo greps the whole shipped suite for networking and tracking APIs on every build and reports zero — the only outbound URLs anywhere in the codebase are BoringRedirect's allow-listed wonder destinations, which open in your browser only because you drifted to a site you'd asked it to guard. The full room-by-room account of where every app stores what lives on the privacy page.

The subscription is why the account exists

These two things aren't separate complaints. A monthly subscription needs an account to attach the billing to, and an account needs a server, and once there's a server it's cheaper to sync everything to it than not. The pricing model quietly drags the data model along behind it.

Buy-once removes the reason to hold anything. Squirrel packs are $5.99 for five to eight apps, or $17.99 for all 38 — paid once, no renewal, nothing quietly billing you in March for a tool you stopped opening in January. Honest footnote: the checkout itself runs through Lemon Squeezy as merchant of record, so they handle your payment details and email under their policy, the same as any store. The apps you download stay zero-collection.

It also changes what happens when you stop paying attention, which for an ADHD brain is the realistic case. A local, one-time-purchase app that you ignore for six months is just... an app you ignored for six months. A subscription you ignore is a charge every month plus a cancellation task that's been sitting on your list since spring.

Four questions that vet any ADHD app in two minutes

This applies to anything, not just ours. Before you hand a tool your medication log or your 11pm brain dump:

1. Can you use it without creating an account? If the first screen demands an email, the data model already assumes a server. That's the fastest signal there is.
2. Does it work with wifi off? Turn it off and open the app. If features go dark, they were being served from somewhere — which means your inputs were going somewhere too.
3. What permissions does it ask for, and can you tell why? A focus tool needing to see which app is frontmost makes sense. A habit tracker asking for contacts or your location doesn't. If the reason isn't obvious from what the app does, treat it as a no.
4. Can you get your data out, and delete it for real? Look for a plain export and a delete that clears the actual file — not a "deactivate account" that only hides a row in someone's database.

If you want the concrete versions of these tools rather than the criteria: FocusJail for the drift, Triage for the freeze on what to do first, and Shutdown for the day that never ends. All three are covered in the full Mac shortlist, and none of them will ever ask you for an email address.

Squirrel apps are wellness tools, not medical devices, and don't diagnose or treat any condition.