The first step to link your thinking. Drop a PDF, Word doc, spreadsheet, email, screenshot or recording — Thunderegg writes clean .md straight into your vault, or beside the original if you would rather. The plain-text format LLMs understand best, and your notes link forever. Nothing uploaded. No account.
AI models are trained on Markdown. Feed them clean .md instead of PDFs and Word files, and you get sharper answers for fewer tokens — while your knowledge stays portable forever.
Markdown strips the formatting bloat of PDF and DOCX. Same meaning, ~30% fewer tokens — lower API costs and more room in the context window.
Headings, lists and tables survive the conversion. That preserved hierarchy is exactly what models use to reason — clearer answers, fewer hallucinations.
Locked in a PDF, a document is a dead end. As .md it becomes a node — wiki-linkable in Obsidian, Notion or any vault, so every file connects to the rest of your thinking instead of sitting in a silo.
Documents, spreadsheets, email, images and recordings — all converted to clean, LLM-ready Markdown.
Email becomes a tidy header + body (attachments listed, never dumped as raw code). Screenshots & scans are read with Apple’s on-device Vision OCR. Audio and video are transcribed on this Mac — Zoom, OBS, Discord and browser recordings included.
Whatever fits your flow — including a file you don’t have yet.
Drop one or many files onto the Thunderegg icon in your Dock. Thunderegg converts them and shows you what it made.
Select any files → Quick Actions → Convert to Markdown. System-wide, no app to open.
Drop files into your MarkItDown Watch folder and they convert automatically — originals tidied away for you.
Hit record and Thunderegg captures the call itself — then turns it into notes. No file to find, nothing to upload. Recording needs macOS 15 or later.
Press record. When you stop, Thunderegg transcribes the whole thing on this Mac and writes the note you would have had to take yourself.
Your microphone is recorded on one channel and everything your Mac plays on the other — so the transcript can tell your words from theirs without guessing, and without a second AI model.
Executive summary, action items with owner and due date, decisions, open questions, risks and the quotes behind them. Action items join your to-do list across the whole vault.
Every summary has to say what it wasn’t sure of, and when the summary came from a small on-device model the transcript is kept underneath, so every line can be checked against what was actually said. Drop it when you’re happy.
Transcription runs entirely on this Mac — the audio is never uploaded. The written summary uses whichever model you choose; pick Local and the whole meeting stays on the machine.
Most “convert to Markdown” tools upload your documents to a server. For contracts, medical records, financials, or anything under NDA, that’s a non-starter.
Thunderegg does all conversion and OCR on-device, via Apple’s built-in Vision engine. Pull the network cable and conversion still works. (Optional AI enrichment is off until you connect a provider — keep it local to stay fully on-device.)
Everything the online converters do — without the upload, the account, or the monthly bill.
| Feature | Thunderegg | Cloud converters |
|---|---|---|
| Files stay on your Mac | Always | Uploaded |
| Works offline | Yes | No |
| Account required | None | Sign-up |
| Pricing | $19.95 once | Per-page / monthly |
| Image OCR | Apple Vision | Varies |
| Record & summarise a meeting | Built in · recording & transcription on-device | Separate subscription |
| Email (.eml / .msg) | Clean parse | Rare |
| Where the Markdown lands | Your vault — or beside the file | Download |
One payment, no subscription, ever. Try it on 5 conversions first — no card, no account.
report.pdf becomes report.md. By default it is filed into your vault; set Where converted notes go in Settings to Beside the original file and it is written next to the source instead. Two files that would claim the same name never overwrite each other.Stop pasting documents into web tools. Try it on five files; it is $19.95 once after that.
Download — 5 free conversions