People often ask us: why doesn't WuCai offer a "local-only, no-login" mode?

We thought hard about it. The answer is: we don't. Here's the reasoning, straight.

1. Notes are worth far more than most people assume

The sentences you highlight, the annotations you write, the page notes you attach — these aren't temporary sticky notes.

They're the accumulation of years of reading, the raw material of your "second brain". When you highlight, annotate and page-note an article, you can later trace your own thinking on a topic through your marks. And once that's gone, you can't get it back — you're not going to re-read every web page you highlighted over three years.

So our attitude toward data is simple: it matters too much to gamble with.

2. Local storage can't guarantee your data won't be lost

"Local-first, no login" sounds nice, but it bets your years of accumulation on "this one device stays fine". Devices fail all the time:

• A phone is lost, dropped in water, or the drive dies;
• The browser is reinstalled, its cache cleared, or you switch browsers;
• You move to a new computer or tablet and the old highlights never come along;
• There's no sync across devices, so what you highlight on your phone isn't on your laptop.

Local-first isn't the same as data-safe. It quietly hands the "keep it safe" job to the user — and almost nobody backs up their browser data regularly until it's already gone.

3. A cloud account makes "never lost" the default

We put "never lost" first, so we chose a cloud account model:

• Sign in and everything syncs — highlights, colours, annotations, page notes, tags;
• Switch phones, reinstall the browser, lose a device — sign back in and it's all there;
• Your full set of marks is always visible in the marker.dotalk.cn dashboard.

For people who treat reading as a long-term accumulation, "never lost" matters more than "never logged in".

4. But we didn't close the "data is yours" door

The cloud handles durability; ownership stays with you.

You can sync your highlights, annotations and page notes to your own local-first vaults: Obsidian, SiYuan, Logseq, flomo, Workflowy. Those vaults live on your machine and are yours to control. In other words:

The cloud handles "not lost"; your local vault handles "ownership" — the two don't conflict.

If you want a "local-first plus cloud backup" compromise, sync WuCai to your Obsidian or SiYuan — see the Obsidian sync guide.

5. We're willing to sacrifice some features, and some users

Straight talk:

• Users who care deeply about privacy and insist on "never log in" will be better served by a local-first tool, and we're fine with you choosing another;
• We also give up some "works fully offline" features because of this.

We're betting that, for most people who treat web reading as accumulation, those trade-offs matter less than "it's still here years later".

The bottom line

WuCai is a cloud account product, not local-first. That's not because we never considered local mode — it's because we're more afraid of losing your data.

If you want local-first plus cloud backup, sync WuCai to your Obsidian or SiYuan. Durability and ownership — we'd rather you have both.

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Related: Highlight tool comparison: how to choose a web highlighter · Page note vs highlight · Sync highlights to Obsidian