The perimeter, without the jargon
Draw a circle around the machines you control — your laptop, maybe a home server. Everything inside the circle is yours. Egress is anything that crosses the line outward.
Traditional AI tools work by shipping your documents across that line so the intelligence can happen elsewhere. Zero egress flips the direction: the intelligence is installed inside the circle.
What stays inside with ZSearch
- The documents themselves — indexed on your disk, never uploaded.
- The index — the searchable map of everything you know.
- The questions you ask, and the answers with their citations.
- Meeting audio and transcripts, processed on-device.
The one honest exception
If you choose to send a specific question to a hosted frontier model, that question crosses the line — by your explicit choice, that one time, with your documents staying home. Sovereignty is not isolation; it is the difference between a door you open and a wall that was never built.