Tasks, time, clients, notes and files, all organized by project and kept on your own machine. Whether you ship code or run a freelance practice, Kaisho is the one place your work lives, with an AI companion that can see all of it. It drafts your invoices, briefs your week, and remembers every decision, so you run your work instead of chasing it.
Prefer to drive it from Claude Code, Cursor or Claude Desktop? See the setup (syncs to your server or ours)
A project is the home for a piece of work. It belongs to a client and gathers that work’s tasks, tracked time, notes and files, with a description, milestones and a status board. It answers the question every scattered tool leaves open: where does everything for this engagement actually live?
Add a task inside a project and it inherits the client and files under the right milestone. Log hours against it and they total on the project automatically. You assign the work, the time follows.
Website Redesign · ACME tasks 12 · 3 open time 47h logged
Briefs, exports, contracts, screenshots and quick notes live on the project they belong to. Drag a file straight onto it: images and PDFs preview inline, text and Markdown edit in place.
files/ brief.pdf logo-v3.png notes kickoff · scope-change
Break the work into milestones with due dates and watch progress fill up at a glance. Drag whole projects across Active, On hold, Completed and Archived, the same feel as the task board.
Design [====== ] 80% Build [== ] 25% Launch [ ] 0%
Belongs to a client · rolls up tasks, time, notes & files · new in v2.7
Install the app, put your work into projects, and let the AI help.
Grab the desktop app for macOS, Windows or Linux from GitHub Releases, or install via pip install kaisho && kai serve. Your projects, tasks, time, clients and notes live in plain files on your own machine. No account required.
Create a project for each engagement and drop its tasks, hours, notes and files inside. Everything for a piece of work finally has one home instead of being spread across ten different tools.
Ask the companion what’s due, what’s unbilled, or who’s over budget, or set it to brief you and draft invoices on a schedule. Bring your own model, or use the hosted AI on your Kaisho server.
Kaisho replaces the scatter of a to-do app, a time tracker, a client list, a notes tool and a folder of files with one app that keeps them in step, and hands the whole picture to your AI.
Every task, hour, note and file organized under the client work it belongs to, with milestones and a drag-to-change status board. Open a project and the whole engagement is right there.
A drag-and-drop board for what’s next and one-click timers for what you’re on now. Hours roll up to the task, the project and the client automatically, ready to bill with no spreadsheet required.
Keep every client with their projects, budgets and contracts in one place. Preview unbilled time, export a clean CSV for your accountant, and see who’s close to budget before it becomes a problem.
Capture decisions, meeting notes and how-tos as plain Markdown. The knowledge base is a second brain that you and your AI can search later, so nothing you learn gets lost.
One assistant with the full context of your work: it plans, tracks, drafts and remembers. Ask it anything in plain language, or schedule it to run on its own. Bring your own model or use the included quota.
Local-first by default: plain text or SQL, no lock-in, works offline. Add hosted sync and a phone app when you want them, and cancel anytime with your data untouched where it started.
Each step feeds the next. Kaisho turns tracked time into context, context into automation, and automation back into knowledge, so nothing leaks between the cracks.
Book time, close a task, or update a budget from the app, the terminal, or just by asking in plain English.
$ kai book 30m "ACME" --project rebrand
Ask anything, grounded in real numbers. "Who’s closest to budget?" pulls from your clocks. "What’s unbilled from May?" sums it by client.
you › who is closest to budget? ACME 147h / 200h · 73%
Schedule the boring parts: a Monday-morning briefing, a Friday invoice draft from unbilled time, a nightly summary of what moved.
every friday 17:00 draft invoice from unbilled
Findings get written back to your knowledge base: client quirks, decisions, how-tos. The next session starts pre-briefed, not from zero.
+ notes/ACME/billing.md
remember → track → the loop closes
Most AI starts every chat from zero. Kaisho’s companion doesn’t: it can see your projects, tasks, tracked hours, clients and notes, so you just ask. "What’s due this week?" "Who’s closest to budget?" "Draft an invoice from May’s unbilled time." It answers in real numbers, and with your say-so it acts: adds the task, books the time, writes the note.
Talk to it like a colleague who already knows the account. Every answer is grounded in your real data, not a guess, and you never copy-paste context in.
you › what's unbilled from May? ACME 18.5h · €2,775 FOXLABS 6.0h · €900
Schedule it to run on its own: a Monday briefing on last week, a Friday invoice draft from unbilled time, a nightly summary. It does the work and leaves you the result.
every friday 17:00 draft invoices from unbilled time
Decisions, client quirks and how-tos get written back to your knowledge base, so the next conversation starts already briefed instead of from scratch.
+ notes: ACME billing quirks + kb: deploy-checklist.md
Bring your own model or use the included quota · your data never trains anyone else’s
Tasks close. Timers reset. The knowledge base grows. What you learn in one session becomes context for the next, written once in plain Markdown, searchable by you and by your AI through the same tools it uses for everything else.
KAISHO
kb/clients/acme/billing-notes.md
VAT rules per project type, the accountant’s preferred invoice format, and who to CC on monthly statements.
kb/projects/rebrand/decisions.md
Why we dropped the second logo direction, and exactly what the client signed off on in the kickoff.
kb/how-to/release-checklist.md
The steps to ship a release, in order, so nothing gets skipped at 6pm on a Friday.
kb/meetings/2026-05-kickoff.md
Scope, deadlines and the three things the client said matter most, captured before they were forgotten.
All entries are plain Markdown. Your AI reads them, writes to them, and never asks you the same question twice.
Prefer the keyboard? Everything in Kaisho is a kai command: start a timer, add a task, draft an invoice or query your notes, and the same commands are available to your AI. The graphical app is optional. There’s even an Emacs mode that keeps your clock in the mode line.
Keep everything in plain text you can read and back up yourself, in portable JSON, or in a SQL database for teams and scale. The app, the terminal, your phone and your AI all work the same across every option, with no lock-in, ever.
Org-mode or Markdown files on your disk. Inspectable, diff-able, Git-friendly.
One structured document set. Easy to back up, script against, and integrate.
SQLite or Postgres for concurrent access and scale. Built for teams and professional deployments.
The plain-text backends are human-readable end to end:
Scroll through the desktop and mobile views. Click any screenshot to enlarge.
The mobile app gives you the same projects, tasks, time and clients as your desktop, and the same AI companion, with the same memory. Book time on the go, check what’s due, ask a quick question. It syncs through a Kaisho server, one you host yourself or one we host, so your time tracking stays under your control.
Drive Kaisho from Claude Code, Cursor or Claude Desktop; run any model you like on the back end; keep open storage you can pipe anywhere else. No lock-in, on either side.
When Kaisho is running, any compatible AI client can reach your projects, tasks, clocks, clients and notes at a local endpoint. The token lives on your machine; nothing leaves it.
claude mcp add --transport http kaisho \
http://localhost:8765/mcp/ \
--header "Authorization: Bearer <your-token>""Open in Kaisho" needs the desktop app (v2.3.1 or later) installed. If nothing happens when you click it, install Kaisho first, then come back.
Kaisho is free and fully open source, yours forever. Run the optional sync and AI server on your own hardware: it is the same software we run, and it needs nothing from us.
Everything is free and self-hostable today. We do not sell a hosted service and do not run one for anyone else.
Kaisho is MIT-licensed, top to bottom. Run the desktop app, the sync server and the AI on your own hardware, and track time from your phone through a Kaisho server you host yourself. Prefer not to run one? Point the apps at a Kaisho-hosted instance, the same open-source image. Either way, the source is on GitHub, the data is yours, and the whole thing works without us.
In Japanese martial arts, kaisho (開手) means “open hand”, the position of readiness. The mark is an open bracket with three lines: the bracket is the palm, the lines are what you carry, your tasks, hours and ideas.
The bracket is not closed. It accepts new entries, holds what matters, and expands when you need it to. Structure without rigidity.