Continuity and Trust
Every serious private credit buyer asks this question. It's the right question. This page is the answer, in plain language. Procurement and risk committees can read it start to finish in ten minutes.
COVENANT runs entirely on your hardware. No cloud AI. No license server. No vendor heartbeat. If No Human Nearby went dark tomorrow, your portfolio monitoring would continue running the same way it did yesterday. Continuity is structural, not contractual.
In a traditional SaaS arrangement, the product lives in the vendor's cloud. When the vendor's servers go down, the product goes down. When the vendor sunsets, the product vanishes, usually with the customer's data.
COVENANT inverts this model. When you upload a borrower's financial statement, the analysis runs on your machine, behind your firewall. There is no third-party API call. There is no cloud inference endpoint. There is no license check that pings a remote server.
If every No Human Nearby server went dark at the same instant, you would not notice. The product would continue to run. Covenants would continue to be tested. The radar would keep sweeping.
Local-first covers operational continuity. Source code escrow covers long-term maintainability. A neutral third party holds a current copy of the product source tree and releases it to paying customers under defined conditions.
Specific trained model weights and proprietary prompt libraries. These are the competitive "how" of the product and remain No Human Nearby intellectual property. The deposited training pipelines give you everything needed to produce your own trained models on your own data if you ever need to operate independently.
A royalty-free internal-use license to the deposited source code for the full duration of your continued operation of COVENANT. Self-hosted operation, internal patching, and continued use on existing or replacement hardware are all permitted. No redistribution rights, no resale rights, no commercial re-licensing.
No Human Nearby. Third-party software escrow through a neutral service runs $1,500 to $3,000 per year. That cost is absorbed as an operating expense, not passed through to customers.
Apple Silicon (the M-series chips COVENANT runs on) is a multi-year hardware generation. Apple's historical support envelope on Mac platforms is 6 to 8 years of first-party updates. Organizations typically run Mac hardware productively for 7 to 10 years.
For local AI inference, the critical hardware properties (unified memory bandwidth, integrated Neural Engine and GPU throughput, sustained thermal stability) do not degrade materially over time. A Mac Studio deployed in 2026 running COVENANT will perform essentially identically in 2031.
Practically, this means one hardware refresh every 5 to 7 years, set by your capex cycle, not by vendor-forced upgrades.
If you ever choose to migrate off COVENANT, you take your data with you. Full covenant tracking history exports as structured JSON and CSV. Lender graphs export in standard graph formats (GraphML, DOT). Historical covenant test outcomes. Portfolio company metadata. Full audit trail.
No proprietary binary formats. No vendor-specific encoding that would require No Human Nearby tools to read the data back. Data schemas are publicly documented.
For customer-initiated migrations, No Human Nearby provides a one-time export package at no additional charge: complete data export, schema reference document, and a 30-day support window for integration questions.
What happens to my portfolio monitoring if No Human Nearby goes out of business tomorrow?
Nothing. The data lives on your hardware. The analysis engine runs on your hardware. The product continues to operate. The escrow release framework delivers a working copy of the source code so you can self-maintain going forward.
Can I audit the escrow deposits to verify they are complete and current?
Yes. Standard software escrow contracts include customer audit rights. No Human Nearby accepts customer audit provisions for escrow verification as part of the contract.
What if I want to stop using COVENANT for my own reasons, not vendor-driven?
You export your data in open formats, migrate wherever you prefer, and the contract terminates cleanly. No data held hostage. No early-termination penalties designed to lock you in.
Are the AI models open or proprietary?
The base models are widely available open-weight models running on your hardware. Training pipelines and fine-tuning recipes are part of the escrow deposit, so you can produce your own trained models on your own data if the vendor relationship ever ends. The specific trained model weights and prompt libraries that ship with COVENANT remain No Human Nearby intellectual property and are not in the deposit.
Is there a named successor if the founder is incapacitated?
No Human Nearby's continuity model does not depend on a single named successor. The escrow release mechanism hands customers full operational control (source code, build scripts, training pipelines, deployment docs) if the vendor is unable to continue. For intellectual property succession, applicable inheritance law applies. Escrow plus standard legal succession is more durable than a single named human, who could themselves become unavailable at any time.
For customer-specific escrow language, contract addenda, or procurement review packages covering this framework:
Email: enterprise@nohumannearby.com
A pre-signature draft of the continuity clauses is available on request.