Launching today
BeaconFind
Find any file by what's inside it. Private, on-device AI.
6 followers
Find any file by what's inside it. Private, on-device AI.
6 followers
BeaconFind is an AI file search app for Windows, press Ctrl+K to find files on your PC by meaning, not just filename. 100% private & offline. Free 14-day trial.
running the models locally for privacy makes sense, but I'm curious about the indexing side of that tradeoff. on a drive with a couple hundred GB of documents, does BeaconFind keep a background process re-indexing as files change, or is it more of an on-demand scan? asking because if I save a new file and search for it 30 seconds later, I want to know whether it'll actually show up yet or if there's a lag before it's searchable.
@galdayan Great question, and the right one to ask.
It's a background file watcher, not a periodic scan. BeaconFind hooks into the OS file-change events for the folders you've indexed, so it isn't crawling your drive on a timer. When nothing changes, it does nothing, idle CPU is basically zero. The only heavy pass is the very first index, where it has to read and understand everything once. On a couple hundred GB that takes a while, but it's a one-time thing.
After that it's incremental and per-file. When you save a new file, the watcher sees it, waits a couple of seconds (so it's not indexing a file that's still being written), then processes just that one file. So your "save it, search 30 seconds later" case: yes, it'll be there. A normal document is searchable within a few seconds. A giant scanned PDF that needs OCR can take a little longer, but you're talking seconds, not minutes.
Two things that come up next, so I'll pre-empt them: it eases off while you're actively using the machine and pauses on battery, so indexing doesn't fight you for resources. And if the app was closed when you changed files, it catches up on the next launch by checking what changed since it last looked, so nothing quietly falls through the cracks.
Happy to go deeper on any of it.
Hey Product Hunt 👋
BeaconFind is a desktop app that searches inside your files by meaning, not just the filename. Press Ctrl+K, type what you remember ("the lease with the pet clause", "invoice from the plumber"), and it finds the right file even if you saved it as scan_0043.pdf. It works across documents, images, screenshots, scanned PDFs, 70+ file types and 50+ languages.
It's a proper native app that runs a handful of small AI models locally, right on your PC. Nothing gets uploaded, there's no account, and the index is encrypted on disk. For a tool that reads everything you own, keeping it all on your machine felt like the only honest way to build it.
Honest bits up front: it's Windows-only for now, and it's paid, with a 14-day trial (€19 lifetime during launch).
I'll be here all day, so ask me anything. Happy to get into the weeds :)