Three years ago, I discovered something that made me sick to my stomach. A popular sales tool I'd been using—one I'd paid thousands of dollars to—had been analyzing my contact lists. Not just storing them. Analyzing them. Building profiles. Selling insights about my business relationships to who-knows-who.
They called it "anonymized data aggregation." I called it betrayal.
Think about what you know about your contacts. Their email addresses, sure. But also their job titles, their companies, their pain points, the deals you've discussed, the contracts you've negotiated. This isn't just data—it's the accumulated intelligence of your business relationships.
And when you upload that to a cloud-based tool? You're trusting a stranger with your crown jewels. A stranger whose business model might change. Who might get acquired by your competitor. Who might suffer a data breach. Who might decide that your data is more valuable than your subscription fee.
When you use cloud-based outreach tools, you're not the customer—you're the product. Your data is being mined, analyzed, and monetized. Those "free" or cheap tiers? They're funded by the value of your business intelligence. Remember: if you're not paying, you're the product.
I quit that tool the same day I found out. And I started building something different. Something where your data never leaves your machine. Where I literally cannot see what you're doing, even if I wanted to. Where the business model is simple: you pay for software, you get software. No data harvesting. No hidden agendas.
When I say Suplex is local-first, I mean it in the most literal sense. Your contacts live on your hard drive. Your emails are sent from your computer. Your research history is stored in a local database I can't access. If Suplex's servers disappeared tomorrow, you'd keep working. You own everything.
Contrast that with cloud tools: if they shut down, you lose everything. If they change their pricing, you're held hostage. If they get hacked, your data is exposed. You're renting your own business relationships.
Some people think I'm paranoid. "Everyone uses cloud tools," they say. "It's fine." But is it? How many data breaches have we seen this year? How many "oops, we accidentally exposed customer data" emails have landed in your inbox? How many companies have pivoted from "we respect your privacy" to "we've updated our terms to allow data sharing"?
I built Suplex this way because I was burned. Because I couldn't find a tool that treated my business data with the respect it deserved. Because I believe that in 2026, we should have options that don't require trading our privacy for convenience.
Is local-first harder to build? Yes. Is it harder to support? Absolutely. Do some people prefer the convenience of cloud syncing? Sure. But for those who care about ownership, about control, about the long-term security of their business intelligence—Suplex is the option that respects those values.
Your data is yours. Your contacts are yours. Your business relationships are yours. Not mine. Not Google's. Not Microsoft's. Yours. And I'll keep building software that honors that simple truth.
Protecting what matters,