Notes stay home
Synthesized answers travel. Files don't.
Your team's knowledge, without your team's privacy.
Vantell lets personal second brains answer each other's questions — while every note stays on its owner's machine.
We see 0.25% of your brain.
A real vault: 187,412 files. Shareable: 475. A quarter of one percent of that brain is even eligible to be talked about — and nothing else ever is.
Of that quarter percent, what reaches us is the label: topic names, note counts, the folder names you picked, a few sample titles you approve first. The files themselves — all 187,412 — never leave your machine, shareable or not.
How it works — the way a healthy office already does
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You don't read a colleague's notebook
It stays closed, under its owner's arm — where it has always been.
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You knock and ask
The door has a handle — and it is visibly on the inside.
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They decide what to tell you
An answer leaves in their own words. The notebook never opens.
Vantell digitizes the knock, never the notebook.
Sharing is not binary
Five disclosure levels, mirroring how people actually share. Everything above a whisper is a decision — yours.
This is the protocol's model — the shape sharing is allowed to take. What ships today implements the knock at its centre: every question waits for your yes, and you write the answer. The automatic levels below, and L4 in particular, are design, not a description of the plugin — see what runs today.
- L0 Existence
"Someone here knows this." Anonymous, automatic.
- L1 Attribution
"Tim knows about this." Standing consent.
- L2 Abstract
A short synthesized answer — never a quote, never a file.
- L3 Depth
A detailed synthesis. Sara asks for depth. Your phone buzzes. You decide.
- L4 Raw
The page itself, for notes explicitly marked raw-shareable. Designed, not built: no note body leaves your machine today.
Three principles, built in — not promised
Can't, not won't
What may be published is a type, not a policy: the payload has no field a note body could ride in. Nothing is being withheld — there is nowhere to put it.
You see everything
Every knock at your brain — who, when, what they said it was for, what you decided — in your log, with a signed receipt. Even we keep the question text out of it.
Why “Vantell”
Vault + tell. The vault that tells — only what it should.
Your second brain is a vault: contents sealed, on your machine, yours. But a vault that can only stay silent is a dead end for a team. So this one tells — it can say which topics live inside, count what it holds, and answer when you decide to open the door. Everything Vantell does sits on that line between vaulting and telling, and the owner draws the line. The name is the contract.
(And if you read the Dutch van in there — “of the telling” — that works too. We're from Belgium; the pun was unavoidable.)
Knock first.
Vantell runs where your notes already are. Today that's Obsidian — the plugin is in the community directory, and everything on this page is what it actually does.
Get Vantell for Obsidian Create your account
- Install it. In Obsidian: Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search Vantell. Needs Obsidian 1.13 or newer.
- Link your vault. A one-time code from app.vantell.ai pairs this device. The signing key is generated on your machine and stays there.
- Choose your folders. Everything starts private. You pick what may be published from, and you see the exact topic labels and counts before anything is sent.
- Answer when someone knocks. Questions arrive in a panel beside your notes. You write every answer yourself — nothing is auto-extracted, nothing sends without you.
Somewhere other than Obsidian? The protocol is open and the connect flow is public — agent connect instructions, or tell us what you're on: hello@vantell.ai.