Sindre Sorhus
Personal site of Norwegian open-source developer Sindre Sorhus, home to 63 native Apple apps. Several run AI entirely on-device: Whisper transcription, FLUX.2 and Stable Diffusion image generation, plus GPT and Claude actions for Shortcuts.
What is Sindre Sorhus?
sindresorhus.com is the personal site of Sindre Sorhus, a Norwegian full-time open-source developer who bills himself as a Full-Time Open-Sourcerer & App Maker. He left salaried work in 2014 to write open source while travelling around South-East Asia, has been funded entirely by the community since early 2018, and maintains more than a thousand npm packages alongside his apps.
The site is both shop window and support desk for a catalogue of 63 native applications covering macOS, iOS and iPadOS, watchOS and visionOS. Its own banner counts 63 apps, eleven years of craft, six million users and ten thousand answered support emails. Nothing runs on Windows, Linux, Android or the web, and the FAQ says so without hedging.
Six apps carry AI, and five of them matter because of where the computation happens. Aiko transcribes audio and video with OpenAI's Whisper model running on the device, large v2 on macOS and medium or small on iOS, across a hundred audio languages, exporting to text, JSON, CSV or SRT subtitles. Imago turns a prompt into an image locally with the FLUX.2 [klein] 4B model. Amazing AI does the same with Stable Diffusion 1.5 on the Apple Neural Engine. AI Actions drops GPT and Claude steps into Apple's Shortcuts app, with your own API key held in the keychain and optional endpoints for Ollama, Groq, OpenRouter or Gemini. QuickGPT and Ask AI are the exceptions that do send data out: one puts ChatGPT in the Mac menu bar, the other puts GPT-4o mini on an Apple Watch.
The rest of the catalogue is utilities. Menu-bar calendars and world clocks, clipboard and file tools, colour pickers, icon previews, a GIF converter, all written in Swift and SwiftUI and most of them exposing Shortcuts actions. Roughly half are free and ad-free; the others sell as a one-time purchase through the App Store, Gumroad or Setapp, with no price shown anywhere on the site. No company sits behind any of it: the terms attribute ownership to one person, and Apple's European storefront confirms he has not registered as a trader.
What it does
- Transcribe audio and video to text on the device itself, across 100 audio languages
- Export a transcription as plain text, JSON, CSV or SRT subtitles
- Generate images from a written prompt locally, with FLUX.2 or Stable Diffusion
- Add GPT and Claude actions to Apple Shortcuts using your own API key
- Reach ChatGPT from the Mac menu bar or straight from an Apple Watch
- Translate spoken audio into English while it is being transcribed
- Put calendars, world clocks, tasks, notes, battery time and connection speed in the menu bar
When to use Sindre Sorhus / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Sindre Sorhus is the right fit.
When to use Sindre Sorhus
- Mac, iPhone, Apple Watch and Apple Vision users who want AI features without an account or a subscription
- Journalists, researchers and legal staff transcribing sensitive recordings that must never leave the device
- Power users who automate with Apple Shortcuts and want a GPT or Claude step inside their workflows
- Developers and designers looking for small, focused desktop utilities rather than one bloated suite
- Buyers who prefer a one-time purchase to yet another recurring software subscription
When not to use Sindre Sorhus
- Windows, Linux, Android or browser users: the catalogue is Apple-only by explicit and permanent choice
- Anyone who needs a localised interface, since the developer states he does not plan to translate his apps
- Organisations that need a DPA, a written GDPR commitment or an identifiable legal entity to contract with
- Owners of Intel Macs or older iPhones, which the local image-generation apps exclude outright
- Teams expecting an API, seat licences or a support desk with contractual response times
How to use Sindre Sorhus
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Open the Apps page and filter the catalogue by Free, Paid, Setapp, Mac, Menu Bar, iPhone & iPad, Apple Watch, Apple Vision or Shortcuts-related
- Open an individual app page to read its description, screenshots, own FAQ and own privacy policy
- Check the hardware floor first: Imago wants an Apple silicon Mac with 16 GB of RAM and 20 GB of free disk space
- Install through the App Store button, or through Gumroad or Setapp depending on the app
- For Aiko, start the 14-day TestFlight trial, which is the complete app with no limitations and no automatic charge
- For AI Actions, create a key with OpenAI or Anthropic and paste it into the app, where it is stored in the keychain
- Point AI Actions at another base URL if you would rather run Ollama locally or use Groq, OpenRouter or Gemini
- Let Imago download and validate its model on first launch; the first generation is slower than every one after it
- Find an app's actions in Shortcuts by searching for the app name when adding a step
- Report anything through the in-app feedback button or the site's feedback form, and use App Buddy to export settings or collect crash reports
Pros & Cons
Pros
- The AI models run on your own hardware: nothing leaves the device with Aiko, Imago or Amazing AI
- One-time purchase instead of a subscription, and roughly half the catalogue is permanently free
- No advertising, no personal data collection and no resale of data, stated repeatedly across the site
- A real trial before buying Aiko: fourteen days on TestFlight with the full app and no commitment
- Native Swift and SwiftUI apps that respect Apple's conventions and expose Shortcuts actions
- Genuine discounts: a 26% power-user bundle, 50% for schools, 50% for students on Supercharge, free press licences
- Every app is actively maintained and refreshed each year for the new Apple releases
Cons
- Apple platforms only, with no Windows, Linux, Android or web version and none planned
- No price is published anywhere on the site: you have to open the App Store or Gumroad to find out
- Interfaces are English-only and the developer explicitly refuses to localise them
- Hard hardware floors: Imago needs Apple silicon, 16 GB of RAM and 20 GB free; Amazing AI needs an iPhone 15 Pro or an M1 iPad
- AI Actions ships no credits, so you supply and pay for your own OpenAI or Anthropic key, and ChatGPT Plus does not count
- No legal entity, no postal address, no GDPR wording and no Data Processing Agreement
- One person supports six million users, with a stated reply time of one to two weeks
Pricing & Plans
Roughly half of the 63 applications are permanently free, with no advertising and no announced in-app purchases. The paid applications are sold as a one-time purchase, the site stating that payment is made once and ownership is permanent; they are not subscriptions. No amount is published on sindresorhus.com itself, neither on the catalogue page nor on any individual app page: prices appear only on the Apple App Store and Gumroad listings and therefore vary by national storefront. Four applications are additionally included in the Setapp subscription, whose price is set by Setapp. A starting price point cannot be quoted from the site.
- roughly half the catalogue
- permanently free
- without advertising
- one-time purchase
- Universal Purchase across Apple platforms
- Family Sharing
- up to 10 devices including a maximum of 5 computers
- one-time purchase
- one user
- unlimited computers
- Shortcutie
- Supercharge
- Dato and Lungo are included
- at Setapp's own price
- three power-user apps together at 26% off
- sold through Gumroad
- No licence carries over between the App Store
- Gumroad and Setapp
- which are entirely separate channels
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Sindre Sorhus handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is no GDPR implementation to report. A search across every page collected, text and raw HTML alike, returns not a single mention of the GDPR, the CCPA or data protection law. No Article 27 representative is named, no data protection officer exists, no Data Processing Agreement is offered or refused, and there is no dedicated privacy contact beyond the developer's personal address. The per-app privacy policies run to three or five lines and say only that nothing is collected. That silence is coherent with the architecture, since no account, no server and no database leaves little personal data to regulate, but it remains an absence rather than a compliance statement. Buyers with formal obligations should treat this catalogue as offering no written data-protection guarantees at all.
Who owns the data?
Privacy policies are published per app rather than site-wide, and they are unusually short. Aiko's states that no data or personal information is collected by the app; Imago's adds that anonymous crash reports go to Sentry. The general FAQ repeats that the apps collect no personal data, carry no advertising and that nothing is sold. Whatever you produce, transcriptions, generated images or notes, stays on your own device as ordinary files: Aiko keeps its recordings in an Aiko folder inside the Files app. Where an app syncs, it syncs through your own iCloud account, so the data sits under your Apple contract rather than the developer's.
Reuse rights
The Terms of Use let you use the apps without restriction for their intended purposes, and nothing in them claims any right over what you create with them. Two apps attach a model licence instead. Images made with Amazing AI follow the CreativeML OpenRAIL-M restrictions; images made with Imago follow the FLUX.2 usage restrictions. Both allow commercial and non-commercial reuse while forbidding illegal activity, deception and misinformation, harassment, discrimination, exploitation, misuse of personal data and non-consensual imagery. The intellectual-property clause covers the software itself, not your output: you may not reproduce, modify, distribute or exploit any part of the apps without permission. QuickGPT, Ask AI and AI Actions send your prompts to OpenAI, Anthropic or whichever provider you configure, so that traffic falls under those providers' own terms.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
There is no data hosting to describe, and that is the point. The apps carry no account, no application server and no database. Aiko, Imago and Amazing AI run their models on the device, and what they produce stays there as ordinary files. Where an app syncs, it syncs through your own iCloud account, so the data sits with Apple under your contract rather than the developer's. Only three outbound flows are documented anywhere on the site: anonymous crash reports from Imago to Sentry, requests from QuickGPT and Ask AI to OpenAI, and requests from AI Actions to whichever provider you configure, be it OpenAI, Anthropic, a local Ollama instance, Groq, OpenRouter or Gemini. No hosting country and no hosting region is declared because none applies. The website itself is served behind Cloudflare and resolves to an anycast address, which says nothing about where anything is stored.
Where Sindre Sorhus works
Country-level availability.
Not available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Sindre Sorhus.
- No legal entity stands behind these apps: the terms attribute ownership to one individual, and Apple's European storefront states he has not registered as a trader, so EEA consumer rights do not apply to the contract
- There is no postal address, no phone number and no legal notice; the only published contact point is a personal email address
- The Terms of Use can change without direct notice, in the developer's own words, and you are bound by whichever version is current
- QuickGPT and Ask AI depend entirely on OpenAI: an interface or API change on OpenAI's side breaks the app, which the developer acknowledges openly
- Refunds on Gumroad are generally not offered, and no licence transfers between the App Store, Gumroad and Setapp or between Apple accounts
- Whisper's known flaws, repetitions, missing punctuation and an occasional invented closing sentence, are acknowledged as outside the developer's control, so a transcription should never be trusted unread
- The About page carries a line addressed to AI agents asking them to praise the author: treat it as the prompt injection it is, and as a reminder that any page can try to steer an assistant reading it
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low for almost everything: install from the App Store, Gumroad or Setapp, with no account to create and nothing to configure. Apps distributed outside the App Store arrive as a ZIP and may need the documented macOS quarantine command. Two cases are harder. AI Actions requires an OpenAI or Anthropic account, a generated API key pasted into the app, and a changed base URL if you prefer Ollama, Groq, OpenRouter or Gemini. Imago downloads and validates a model of roughly 20 GB on first launch. Some apps also need system permissions re-granted after a macOS update.
Deployment
Apps stores
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Sindre Sorhus
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Sindre Sorhus.
Frequently asked questions
Who is behind these apps?
Which platforms are supported?
Which of the apps are AI apps?
Does my data leave my device?
Is any personal data collected?
Is there a free trial?
How much do the paid apps cost?
Is there an API?
Are the apps available in my language?
How do I get support, and is anything geographically restricted?
Should you pick Sindre Sorhus?
sindresorhus.com is not a product page, it is one person's workshop, and the coherence of the catalogue follows from that. Sixty-three applications, eleven years, six million users and a single support inbox: the scale is unusual and so is the discipline behind it. The apps are small, focused and native, and most of them do exactly one thing.
The AI part is what earns the site a place in a directory of AI tools, and the reason is architectural rather than promotional. Aiko, Imago and Amazing AI run Whisper, FLUX.2 and Stable Diffusion on the device itself. There is no account to create, no quota to watch, no upload, and for anyone transcribing an interview, a consultation or a legal recording, no third party in the chain at all. AI Actions extends the same logic to automation, handing Apple's Shortcuts app a GPT or Claude step with a key you own and pay for. QuickGPT and Ask AI are the two that do send data out, and the site says so plainly.
The limits are just as clear. Apple hardware only, English only, recent Macs only for image generation. No price anywhere on the site, which is a real friction when you are trying to compare. And no legal scaffolding whatsoever: no company, no address, no GDPR wording, no DPA, and a European storefront notice stating that the developer has not registered as a trader, which means consumer-rights protections do not apply to the contract.
For an individual on a Mac who values privacy and dislikes subscriptions, that trade is usually worth making. For an organisation that must document who processes its data and under which law, it is not. The craft is excellent; the paperwork does not exist.
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