About Vehla

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 is a one-time $29.99 purchase. Two-Mac activation. Free updates for life. No subscriptions, no "AI credits", no upsell flow when you launch the app. We'd rather earn the next purchase than rent you this one.

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.

Less, but better.

Sixty actions sounds like a lot. They aren't, because most are deep variants of the same thing. The hard work was the prompts and the defaults — picking exactly the right tone for "Rewrite — Confident", the right output format for "Calendar Event", the right level of brevity for "Summarize". Each one earns its slot.

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.
Slow release cadence. Major versions roughly twice a year. Patch releases when something matters.
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 easier to manage, improve the built-in action set, 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.