Local edition

The local edition is the kcap server running on your own Mac: the same web app, the same agent tools, the same storage. Your sessions never leave the machine; the one exception you can opt into is a cloud AI provider key, which sends the text that provider embeds or judges to that provider. It is what Free means while kcap is invite-only, and it has no plan gating: every feature that does not need other people or Kurrent-managed AI is available

What it is and isn’t

	Local edition	Cloud workspace
Where sessions live	This Mac, under ~/.config/kcap/local	Infrastructure Kurrent operates
Who can read them	You	Whoever you share with
Sign-in	None	Work email or GitHub
Listens on	Loopback only	The internet, behind sign-in
Kurrent-managed AI	No; bring your own keys or run without	Yes, on every plan
Insights agent	No; your coding agent queries analytics through kcap’s tools instead, which are not plan-gated here	Yes (Team and Enterprise)
Embeddings	Ollama on this machine, or your Voyage/OpenAI key	Managed, or your key
Hosted agents, flows, evals, knowledge, pages	Yes, on this machine	Yes
Teams, projects, sharing, machine credentials	No	Yes
Telemetry	Never exported, whatever the environment says	Anonymous, switchable

Install it

From the desktop app, choose For you, locally on the first screen. From a terminal:

curl -fsSL https://www.kurrent.io/install | bash -s -- -- --local
kcap setup --local               # after an npm install

Setup downloads the server bundle for this version, starts it as a background service on a free port, and continues with the usual agent, visibility and history questions. The web app is at the URL kcap local status prints; kcap local open opens it

kcap local status      # version, port, service, each store, and what to do if something is wrong
kcap local start
kcap local stop
kcap local restart
kcap local logs -n 200

Where your data lives

Everything is under ~/.config/kcap/local (or KCAP_LOCAL_ROOT): the event store, the read-model database, the server binaries by version, and logs/. Back it up by stopping the server and copying the directory; restore by copying it back and starting. Moving to another Mac is the same copy; the installation keeps its identity and URL

Bring your own AI

With no keys configured, storing, recall, hosted agents and knowledge all work; titles, outcomes and evaluations wait for a provider. In the web app’s Administration → AI & models add an Anthropic, OpenAI, Cohere or OpenRouter key for evaluations and summaries, and choose Ollama under Embeddings to run mxbai-embed-large on this machine for semantic search and fact clustering. Local evaluations through your daemon use your own Claude Code sign-in

Keep it up to date

kcap update updates the CLI and then runs kcap local upgrade, which moves the server forward to the new version. The upgrade is forward-only: a failure before the switch starts the old version again; a failure after it leaves the new version selected and stopped, and kcap local start tries again. The desktop app does the same on its own

Move to a cloud workspace

Join or create a cloud workspace, then import your local history into it. Make the cloud profile the active one everywhere, confirm the import will go to the right server, then import:

kcap use <cloud-profile> --global
kcap whoami                      # Server: must be your cloud workspace
kcap import --all

A repository you bound to the local profile earlier keeps that binding; run kcap use <cloud-profile> inside it first. The local edition keeps running until you uninstall it

Uninstall

kcap local uninstall             # removes the server and its service; data and identity stay
kcap local uninstall --purge     # also deletes data, logs, pending recordings and caches

Without --purge, kcap setup --local brings the same installation back on the same URL. With it, the URL is retired and a new installation gets a new port. --force uninstalls while a daemon is still running agents

Help me get unstuck

The server will not start. kcap local status names which store failed and what to do; kcap local logs has the server’s, Postgres’s and KurrentDB’s output. The desktop app’s recovery screen offers the restart; the logs are read from a terminal

The app says the installation is incomplete. A setup, upgrade or purge was interrupted. The next kcap local start or upgrade finishes or undoes it first

Nothing uploads after I moved to cloud. Your active profile still points at the local server. kcap use <cloud-profile> --global