About Vehla - A menu-bar AI for people who already work fast

The problem we kept hitting

The best writing tool on a Mac is the one you're already in. Mail, Notes, your IDE, a Slack draft. The worst place to write is a chatbot in a tab, where you tab away, lose your context, paste, edit, paste back, and forget what you were doing. Every step is a tiny tax.

We wanted an AI that lived next to the cursor - not in another window. We tried every existing menu-bar AI. They were close, but none of them did the simple thing well: a fast palette, smart action presets, the keyboard shortcut you'd actually use, and the option to run it all locally so you could put it on your work laptop without a privacy review.

What we believe

Local-first is the default, not a checkbox.

You shouldn't have to "go private" to feel safe. Vehla's local mode runs Gemma 4 on Apple Silicon for common writing and productivity actions. Cloud is optional, with your own keys, and Vehla does not proxy your prompts through a Vehla inference server.

Software you buy is software you own.

Vehla Free is free forever. If you need every advanced feature, Vehla Pro is a one-time $29.99 purchase with two-Mac activation and free updates for life. No subscriptions or auto-billing. We'd rather offer a useful free product and earn the upgrade than rent you the app.

Keyboard before mouse.

The primary flow is keyboard-first: open the palette, navigate, filter to snippets with /, run the focused action, and close with Esc. The mouse is there when you want it, but it is not required for the core loop.

Depth without clutter.

Vehla ships with 73 built-in AI actions, more than 100 native commands, QuickGlass, Flow dictation, and a Store for command extensions, but the palette stays personal: hide what you do not use, favorite what matters, add aliases, or package your own actions and workflows. The hard work is in the defaults - the tone for "Rewrite - Confident", the event shape for "Generate Calendar Event", and the right level of brevity for "Summarize".

Who's behind it

Vehla is built by a tiny team in Ottawa, Canada. We obsess about feel - the texture of the palette, the curve of an animation, the friction in a workflow. The kind of small details that don't show up in a feature list but determine whether you keep the app installed.

How we work

No telemetry. We removed it in v1.3.0 and we won't add it back.
Release notes that name the work. Feature releases explain what changed; maintenance releases focus on performance, reliability, and polish.
Every customer email gets a reply. Usually within a day, from a human, often the one who wrote the code in question.
We say no a lot. Most features people request are good ideas. We ship the ones that make Vehla feel sharper, not heavier.

What's next

The roadmap is short on purpose: keep the palette fast, make local models and speech models easier to manage, improve the built-in action and extension system, and polish the parts of macOS integration that make Vehla feel native.

If you've made it this far, you're probably the right person to try Vehla. Download it. We'd love to hear what you think.

A menu-bar app for people who already work fast.