Your business data should live on your computer.
Published May 19, 2026
I want to talk about something that sounds boring but isn’t.
A few months ago, a friend of mine — also a one-person business — sent me a panicked text. The platform she’d been using to run her client work for three years had just announced they were shutting down. She had ninety days to “export her data.” She tried. The export came back as an unreadable JSON file. Her actual usable records — client notes, project history, invoices — were gone.
She hadn’t done anything wrong. She’d just trusted that “the cloud” meant safety.
It doesn’t. The cloud is just somebody else’s computer. And when somebody else’s computer gets sold, shut down, hacked, repriced, or quietly changes its terms of service, your data goes with it.
Here’s the bargain we’ve all been making, mostly without thinking about it: we hand our most important records — our income, our client information, our project notes, our years of small business history — to a company we don’t know, in exchange for the convenience of “I can access it from anywhere.”
Most of the time that bargain is fine. Until it isn’t.
It isn’t fine when the company gets acquired and the new owner triples the price.
It isn’t fine when their security gets breached and your client list ends up somewhere you can’t see.
It isn’t fine when they decide your account violated some terms you didn’t read, and they lock you out for six weeks while it gets reviewed.
It isn’t fine when they shut down the product entirely and give you a JSON file as a goodbye gift.
It isn’t fine when they decide what your data is worth, where it goes, and who gets to see it.
For software that genuinely needs the cloud — collaboration tools, anything multi-user, anything that has to talk to a server — the trade-off makes sense. You’re paying for capability you couldn’t have any other way.
But for the records of a one-person business? You don’t need the cloud. You need a folder on your own computer. With a backup. That’s it.
When I built Maryn, this was non-negotiable. The whole app lives on your machine. Your income, your invoices, your mileage log, your journal entries, your client notes — all of it sits in a file on your hard drive, the same way a Word document does. Nobody else has a copy. Nobody else can lose it. Nobody else can change the price of access tomorrow.
This means a few things in practice:
You don’t sync across devices. Maryn opens on your laptop, the same way Photoshop or Excel or any other “real” desktop application does. If you want it on a second computer, you copy the file over. (Most solopreneurs run their business on one machine anyway. We’re not a team of fifty needing real-time collaboration. We’re one person, working in one window.)
You back up your data the way you back up anything else important — Time Machine, an external drive, a cloud backup service of your choosing. Maryn doesn’t decide where your backup lives. You do.
You can use Maryn on a plane, in a coffee shop with bad wifi, in a power outage with a charged laptop. The internet being weird doesn’t break your business records.
And — this is the one I keep coming back to — if Maryn the company ever stops existing, your data doesn’t go anywhere. The app keeps working. Your records keep being yours. Forever.
I think a lot about the difference between renting software and owning it. We’ve slid into renting almost everything in the last decade and it happened so quietly I barely noticed. My music is rented. My movies are rented. My photo storage is rented. Most of my work tools are rented.
For some things, fine. For my business records — the actual receipts of years of work — no.
Your business data is the most personal data you have. It tells the story of every choice you’ve made, every dollar that came in, every dollar that went out, every client you served, every late-night idea you wrote down. It deserves to live somewhere you control. On your machine. In your backup. Under your name.
If that resonates with you — Maryn was built for it.
— Jen