Capture — or don't
Type it in one line, hit ⌘K from anywhere, or let DEFT read your inbox. The Gmail ingestor finds real action items in your mail and fills your plate before you've opened the app. Your task list stops being a chore you maintain.
Mac & Windows Menu bar and system tray, real native notifications, works offline
The to-do list that
starts the work for you.
DEFT is a personal AI chief of staff for your desktop. Capture a task and background agents begin immediately — researching, drafting, triaging your inbox — then hand you a finished brief. You're not buying another task manager. You're buying back the hours that life admin quietly takes.
Also for Windows 10+ Also for macOS 14+
macOS 14+ & Windows 10+ 14-day free trial No credit card Read-only Google access
DEFT — Today
⏎
- Your board is empty. Type a task above, or tap one of the examples.
DEFT can start on this right now
I can scan 50+ hotels in Sri Lanka, compare prices and ratings, and bring you a top-5 shortlist when you're ready.
Auto-dismisses in 30s. Nothing runs without your click.
DEFT now
Sri Lanka hotels research is ready — top 5 found.
A live preview, not a video. Try it — then drag the prompt sheet down to throw it away.
Built by and for people who ship alone
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See it work
Two minutes, one task, zero blank pages.
Watch a task go from a single line of text to a sourced, structured brief — without anyone opening a browser tab.
Product demo — 2 min 04 s
The initiation gap
You don't have a motivation problem. You have a starting problem.
For high-output people, the hours don't disappear during the work. They disappear in the gap between deciding to do something and actually beginning it. Every other tool reminds you the gap exists. DEFT closes it.
Every other task app
- You add “Research hotels in Sri Lanka.”
- You open six tabs, get overwhelmed, close all six.
- Snooze.
- Snooze again.
- Delete the task out of guilt.
- Book something mediocre in three panicked minutes.
Six days of dread. One bad decision.
With DEFT
- You type “Research hotels in Sri Lanka.”
- DEFT: “I can scan 50+ hotels and bring you a shortlist. Start?”
- You click Start in background and go back to your real work.
- Desktop notification: “Top 5 hotels ready — with prices and sources.”
- You review, pick one, mark it done.
Twenty-two minutes. Zero tabs. One good decision.
How it works
Three steps. Two of them aren't yours.
DEFT leans in
In under two seconds a classifier decides whether an agent can meaningfully help. If it can, a prompt slides up with a specific offer — not “want AI help?” but “I can scan 50+ hotels and bring you a shortlist.” If it can't, DEFT says nothing at all.
You approve
The agent works in the background — you can quit the app. It streams every step to a live activity rail, then pings you natively when the brief is ready: structured, sourced, and clearly labelled with what it did and didn't do.
Agents do the groundwork.
They stop at the last inch.
DEFT never sends the email. Never books the room. Never buys the thing. That isn't a setting we ask you to trust — the tools that could do it aren't in the app. Every agent output is a draft waiting for one human decision: yours.
Every other task manager
“Remind me to book a plumber.”
DEFT
“I found 3 plumbers with 4+ stars, checked your calendar for Tuesday morning, and drafted the emails. You send them.”
D
Delegate
Hand off the research, the first draft, the triage. One line of text is the whole handoff.
E
Execute
Agents run in a real background worker pool. Close the lid — the job keeps going.
F
Focus
A calm interface that follows your system light or dark. One brief each morning. Three priorities. No badge counts.
T
Track
Every state change, agent step and source is written to an activity trail you can read end to end.
What's inside
An operating system, not a checklist with AI bolted on.
Task Autopilot
Create a task and a deterministic pipeline fires: classify intent, route to the right agent, draft the artefact, cluster related work. No prompt engineering, no chat window.
classify → route → draft → approveLive agent rail
Every tool call, every source, every retry streams to a log you can tail in real time over WebSocket. Nothing about the agent's work is a black box.
web_search · url_scraper · summariserZero-entry Gmail capture
A classifier reads snippets of new mail, finds the genuine action items, and offers them as tasks in batches of five. Newsletters and receipts never make the cut.
read-only · snippets discardedCalendar-aware capacity
Set a due date on a day with four meetings and DEFT tells you before you commit: “~1.5 hours of focus time left. Thursday is better.” Honest planning, not optimistic planning.
conflict detection · free-block mathsThe Daily Brief
One notification each morning: your real capacity, the three things that actually matter today, what the agents finished overnight, and what you've been avoiding for eight days.
8:30am · max 3 prioritiesReminders that don't nag
Reminders arrive with context and options, batch themselves when three land in one hour, and after the third snooze DEFT asks the honest question: should this go to the backlog?
anti-spam by designAny model, including yours
OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Fireworks, or your own self-hosted gateway — one interface, switchable live from Settings. Bring your own key and your prompts bill to your account.
vendor-agnostic · BYO keyShare one task, not your account
Send a single task as a link. The recipient needs no account and sees nothing else you own. Revoke it and the URL 404s instantly.
scoped · revocable · hashed tokensPrivacy
We asked for the smallest key that opens the door.
You're being asked to connect your inbox to an AI that runs while you're not watching. That deserves more than a policy page. Here is exactly what DEFT can and cannot do — enforced in code, not in copy.
Your email bodies are never stored
The classifier reads a short snippet, decides if there's an action item, and discards it. We keep the message ID so a task can link back to the thread — nothing else.
Conservative mode isn't a toggle
There is no email_send, calendar_create, booking_execute or order_place tool in the binary. An agent cannot take an outbound action because the capability does not exist.
Tokens are encrypted and stay server-side
Google OAuth tokens are encrypted at rest with AES-256 and never leave the backend — the desktop app never sees them. Share tokens are 32 random bytes, hashed with SHA-256 before storage.
Bring your own model key
Point DEFT at your own OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock or self-hosted gateway and your prompts never touch our inference infrastructure. Your data, your provider, your bill.
Leave with everything
One click in Settings revokes your Google tokens immediately and permanently deletes every task, brief and agent output within 24 hours. No retention window, no recovery, no exit interview.
No training on your data. Ever.
Your tasks, mail and agent outputs are never used to train models — ours or anyone else's. There is no “improve the product” checkbox buried in Settings, because there is nothing to opt out of.
Google OAuth scopes DEFT requests
- ✓gmail.readonly
- ✓calendar.readonly
- ✓userinfo.email
- ✓userinfo.profile
- ✕gmail.send
- ✕gmail.modify
- ✕calendar.events.write
- ✕contacts
- ✕drive
The struck-through scopes aren't “not yet.” Requesting write access to your inbox would
make DEFT a different product, and we'd rather ship a smaller one you can trust.
Read the full privacy policy →
Social proof
The moment it clicks is always the same.
Someone adds a task, forgets about it, and gets pinged an hour later with exactly what they needed.
[N]founders, engineers and PMs in the private beta
[N]agent jobs run for beta users to date
<2sfrom capture to “I can start on this”
0emails sent, rooms booked or cards charged by an agent
“I added a task and forgot about it. Forty minutes later my desktop told me the research was done. I've never had software make me feel less behind.”
“The scope list sold me. I've refused three other AI tools because they wanted write access to my inbox. DEFT asked for read-only and explained why.”
“The daily brief is the only notification on my desktop I haven't turned off. Three priorities, what the agents finished, done. It respects that I have a nervous system.”
Pricing
Priced like a tool, not like a seat.
DEFT is personal software. No per-seat maths, no sales call, no annual lock-in. Cancel from Settings in one click.
Starter
For feeling the magic moment
$1.99
/month
Billed monthly
- Unlimited tasks, subtasks and links
- 25 agent runs per month
- Gmail + Google Calendar, read-only
- The Daily Brief and smart reminders
- Native Mac & Windows app, menu bar or tray, offline capture
- Community support
Max
For people who delegate all day
$20
/month
Billed monthly
- Everything in Starter, plus:
- 500 agent runs per month
- Priority agent queue — your jobs jump the line
- Deep Research, Options Scout and Doc Review agents
- All model providers + bring your own API key
- Shared task links and 30-day brief history
- Email support, 24-hour response
Unlimited
For running your whole operation through DEFT
$49.99
/month
Billed monthly
- Everything in Max, plus:
- Unlimited agent runs and API credits
- Unlimited token usage — no per-job ceiling, no throttling
- Slack — capture from a DM, get briefs in a channel
- Notion, Linear, Jira, GitHub and Google Drive integrations
- Custom agents — write your own pipeline steps
- Voice capture and multi-workspace profiles
- Early access to the iOS companion
- Priority support, 4-hour response
All plans include a 14-day free trial — no credit card to start. Prices in USD, billed
through Stripe, cancel any time.
Need invoicing, a team plan, or something bespoke? Talk to us.
FAQ
The questions people actually ask.
Will DEFT ever send an email or book something on my behalf?
No. DEFT runs in conservative mode, and it isn't a setting you can flip. The tools that send email, create calendar events, complete bookings or make purchases are not present in the shipped binary. Agents research, compare, summarise and draft. Every outbound action is yours.
What does DEFT do with my Gmail?
DEFT requests the gmail.readonly scope only — never gmail.send or gmail.modify. It classifies short message snippets to spot action items, then discards them. Only the Gmail message ID is stored, so a task can link back to the original thread. Full message bodies are never written to our database.
Which platforms does DEFT support?
macOS 14 Sonoma or later on Apple silicon and Intel, and Windows 10 or later on 64-bit. DEFT lives in your menu bar on Mac and your system tray on Windows, fires real native notifications on both, and keeps working offline against a local cache. It follows your system appearance, so it is dark when your desktop is dark and light when it is not, or you can pin either one in Settings.
Can I use my own OpenAI or Anthropic API key?
Yes, on Max and Unlimited. DEFT talks to every model through one provider interface, with adapters for OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Fireworks and any self-hosted OpenAI-compatible gateway. Bring your own key and your prompts bill to your account and never touch our inference infrastructure. You can switch providers live from Settings — the next agent job picks up the change.
What counts as an agent run?
One agent run is one complete background job on one task — a research job that searches the web, reads sources and returns a shortlist, for example. Task classification, reminders, the Daily Brief and Gmail triage never count against your quota. Your usage is visible in Settings at all times, and we never silently throttle you.
Does DEFT work offline?
Capturing, editing and browsing tasks all work offline against a local cache and sync the moment you reconnect. Agent runs need a connection, because they search the live web and call a model.
How is this different from asking ChatGPT to do the same thing?
You have to remember to open a chat window, describe the context, wait, then copy the result somewhere useful. DEFT starts from the task you already wrote, keeps the context, runs in the background while you do something else, and files the result against the task with its sources and activity trail. The difference is initiation: a chatbot waits for you, DEFT doesn't.
Can I cancel or delete my data at any time?
Yes. Cancel from Settings in one click — no email, no retention offer — and you keep access until the end of the billing period. Deleting your account revokes your Google tokens immediately and permanently removes all data within 24 hours.
Is there a mobile version?
Not yet. DEFT is desktop-first on purpose: real background agents, native notifications and offline capture are hard to do well on a phone. An iOS companion for capture and reading briefs is on the roadmap, and Unlimited subscribers get early access when it ships. Android will follow it.
Contact
Talk to the people who build it.
DEFT is a small operation. Your message doesn't go to a queue — it goes to the person who wrote the code.
support@deftos.aiSupport, billing, bugs and feature requests. We answer within one business day.
Security & privacy questionsWrite to support@deftos.ai with “Security” in the subject and it gets routed straight to engineering.
Press & partnershipsReviewing DEFT or building something adjacent? Tell us what you need and we'll get you set up.
Stop starting from zero.
Download DEFT, connect nothing, and type one task. You'll know within two minutes whether this is the tool you've been describing to people for years.
Also for Windows 10+ Also for macOS 14+
macOS 14+ Windows 10+ 14-day free trial From $1.99/month