Your schedule should be a file you own.
Most apps store your calendar in their database. We store it in plain text on your device. That changes everything.
Think about where your schedule actually lives right now:
- It's in Apple Calendar's database—locked to iCloud.
- It's in Fantastical, which reads from the same database—under a subscription that keeps recurring as long as you want access to your own calendar.
- It's in Notion, where your week is rows in a table you can export to CSV, losing most of the structure.
In every case, your schedule lives inside the app's shape. Stop paying, lose your sync, switch tools—and what you get back is a CSV dump, if you're lucky.
Markdown made notes portable. OpenTime makes schedules portable.
Twenty years ago, your writing lived in a Word file you couldn't open without Word. Then Markdown happened. Plain text. Human-readable. Versioned in git. Opened in any editor. Your notes belonged to you, not to your note app.
Your schedule is the last thing that hasn't had its Markdown moment. OpenTime is it.
It's YAML you can read.
This is what a piece of your schedule looks like in OpenTime:
type: task
title: Send proposal to Acme
due: 2026-05-15
project: Client Work
priority: high
---
type: event
title: Lunch with Sarah
start: 2026-05-13T12:30
duration: 60m
location: Café Vita
---
type: habit
title: Morning walk
schedule: every weekday at 07:00
streak: 14That file is on your computer. In a folder you chose. You can open it in any text editor. You can put it in git. You can write a script against it. You can hand it to another OpenTime-compatible app and it just works.
This is not a feature. This is the foundation everything else sits on.
What you get when your data is actually yours.
Insurance
If Elysium goes away tomorrow, your schedule doesn't. It's plain text. You can open it in any text editor. You can edit it. You can move it to anything that reads OpenTime—or to a text editor and nothing else.
Speed
Local files load instantly. No spinner. No syncing wait. Your week is on screen before a cloud app finishes its handshake.
Privacy
Your schedule never leaves your device unless you choose to sync it. Nothing about your day is sitting in a vendor's analytics pipeline by default.
What local-first isn't.
We're not going to pretend local-first is free. The trade-off is real:
- Sync isn't automatic out of the box—you opt in (and we offer it for $50/year if you want it).
- Sharing requires more thought than tossing a Notion link into Slack.
- If you lose your laptop without backups, the files lose with it.
We think those trade-offs are worth it for the people who care about owning their work. If you don't, that's fair—there are great cloud-first tools and we'll recommend them when asked. But if “I want my data on my machine, in a format I can read” is a sentence that resonates, you're who we built this for.
Bring order from chaos. Keep it in your hands.
Elysium is free forever for the core. Add cloud sync when you want it. Your schedule, in your format, on your device.