Obsidian meeting notes should be files, not rows in a vendor’s database.

A meeting note is only yours if it exists as a file you can open, grep, sync, and back up without asking anyone’s permission. Everything else is a lease.

The SaaS notetaker data model

Every cloud meeting assistant stores your conversations the same way: rows in a multi-tenant database, behind an account, behind a subscription, behind an API with rate limits. The “export” button is an afterthought — usually a ZIP of HTML or a PDF that strips the structure you’d want to query.

That model has three failure modes, and none of them are hypothetical:

• The vendor changes terms. Retention policies, training carve-outs, and pricing tiers get rewritten under you. Your two years of client history are the leverage.
• The vendor gets breached or subpoenaed. A centralized store of thousands of companies’ conversations is exactly the target the last decade of breach disclosures describes.
• The vendor shuts down. Meeting-tool consolidation is ongoing; sunset emails give you 90 days and an export queue.

If your client work has any confidentiality dimension — coaching, consulting, legal, finance — each of these is not an inconvenience. It is a conversation you owe a client.

What a note-as-a-file looks like

Fazit’s entire output is a Markdown file written into a Fazit/ folder inside your existing Obsidian vault. Not a plugin database, not a sidecar format — a file named 2026-07-16 1030 Client kickoff.md, written atomically, that Obsidian indexes like anything else you wrote by hand.

Each note opens with plain YAML frontmatter:

---
source: Fazit
started: 2026-07-16T09:30:12Z
ended: 2026-07-16T10:02:47Z
audio_retained: false
---

Below it: the summary, key moments, action items with owners, a paste-ready follow-up email, and the full You/Them transcript. When the call ends, Fazit opens the note directly via Obsidian’s obsidian://open?path= URL scheme — the note appears in your vault seconds after you click Stop.

Frontmatter is an audit surface

Because the metadata is structured YAML rather than a vendor dashboard, your vault becomes queryable with the tools you already run. A Dataview table of every client session this quarter:

TABLE started, ended
FROM "Fazit"
WHERE audio_retained = false
SORT started DESC

Note the WHERE clause. audio_retained: false is stamped into every note not as a compliance checkbox but as a description of the execution path: audio lives in a fixed-size ring buffer in RAM, transcription consumes a snapshot, and the buffer is reset unconditionally on every exit path. The note can truthfully carry that line because there is no code path that writes audio to disk. The full argument is in Why “Never Records” Is Not Marketing — It Is an Invariant.

That means an auditor — or a skeptical client — asking “where are the recordings of our calls?” gets a one-line answer: there never were any. The distinction between never created and created then deleted is the entire game, and it is visible in every file’s first ten lines.

The pipeline that makes local-only possible

None of this requires a server because the whole pipeline runs on Apple Silicon:

• Capture: a process tap on the call app plus the mic, into RAM.
• Transcription: on-device ASR — no audio leaves the machine.
• Note generation: a local model produces the summary and follow-up email; the transcript never touches an API.
• Write: one atomic Markdown write into your vault. That write is the only persistence in the system.

In 2024 this stack required a gaming GPU and patience. In 2026 it runs quietly in a menubar app on the laptop you already own. The economic argument for shipping your client conversations to a datacenter is gone; what remains is vendor lock-in dressed as convenience.

Data sovereignty is now a client-facing question

Regulated and privacy-sensitive professionals are increasingly being asked by their clients what tools touch the conversation. EU clients ask about transfer mechanisms; enterprise procurement asks for subprocessor lists. A cloud notetaker adds a subprocessor. A local pipeline that writes plain files into a vault you control adds nothing to the list — there is no third party to disclose, because there is no third party.

(As always: this describes architecture, not legal advice. Consent for transcription is on you, and Fazit ships a one-line disclosure notice for exactly that.)

Plain text also solves the boring half of sovereignty: portability. Markdown files sync with Obsidian Sync, iCloud, Syncthing, or git. They will open in whatever replaces Obsidian in fifteen years. No vendor’s export queue is on the critical path of your professional memory.

FAQ

Does Fazit require an Obsidian plugin?

No. Fazit writes standard Markdown files into a folder in your vault. Obsidian indexes them natively; Dataview and search work immediately.

Where exactly do notes go?

Into a Fazit/ subfolder of the vault you choose in Settings, named yyyy-MM-dd HHmm Title.md.

If I sync my vault, isn’t the transcript in the cloud anyway?

That’s your choice to make — and that’s the point. The text syncs under your sync tool’s encryption and your account. The audio was never a file anywhere, so there is nothing riskier than your own written notes in the loop.

Can I use it without Obsidian?

Yes. The notes are plain Markdown; if Obsidian isn’t installed, Fazit opens them in your default Markdown editor.