Clean a messy drive without trusting a black box.
Archivist Sort scans terabytes in seconds, shows you every suggested move, and executes only the plan you approve — with a receipt for every action and one-click rollback. Your files never leave your Mac.
Launch price — goes to $49 when the first public case studies land. No countdown games; the price rises with proof.
Notarized & stapled by Apple · Developer ID signed · SHA-256 published below · zero telemetry
It doesn't guess. It testifies.
Every "smart cleaner" asks you to trust it. Archivist Sort is built the opposite way — like evidence handling, not magic:
- Scan — 15,000 files in ~2 seconds; terabyte archives in minutes. Read-only.
- Review — duplicates (byte-exact and perceptual), stale files, suggested folder structure. You see everything before anything moves.
- Approve — nothing executes without your explicit acknowledgement. No approval, no action.
- Quarantine — approved moves go to a quarantine, never straight to deletion.
- Receipt — every action is journaled with checksums.
- Rollback — one command restores originals, byte-verified.
Protects what tools destroy
Sacred paths
Rekordbox and Pioneer/AlphaTheta device libraries, keys, and git internals are inventoried as protected classes and never moved — enforced at plan time and again at execution. Everything else is only ever suggested for your review; nothing moves without your approval.
Local-first, provably
No cloud calls. No accounts. No telemetry. The engine works fully offline — the page you're reading makes claims the binary can back.
Video archive intelligence
Transcribe locally with Whisper-family backends and search every spoken word across your archive. Export the matching source files as an experimental FCP7 XML (xmeml) bin — a handoff starting point for Resolve or Premiere, not a finished timeline.
Agent-native
41 MCP tools let Claude, Codex, and other AI agents drive scans and plans under the same fail-closed gates you get — reviewed, receipted, reversible.
Verify before you install
The DMG is Developer ID signed, notarized by Apple, and stapled. Check it yourself:
shasum -a 256 Archivist-Sort.dmg # be0bccba86ac465a6109c810b00fe227f3d88653bd122f170c7443254c36fe38 spctl -a -vv -t install Archivist-Sort.dmg # expected: accepted · source=Notarized Developer ID
Pricing
| Personal | $29 one-time (launch price — $49 after the first public case studies). Current major version + maintenance updates for that major. Your Macs, no seat tracking, no phone-home. |
|---|---|
| Team / site license | Multi-seat and organizational use — contact us. Built for environments where data cannot touch cloud APIs. |
Requirements
Apple silicon or Intel Mac · macOS 11.0+ · notarized DMG install. Optional local transcription: any of whisper-cli, openai-whisper, or mlx-whisper — the app finds Homebrew and pipx installs automatically. Sort works fully without transcription.
Questions a careful buyer asks
Does any of my data leave my machine?
No. There is no server side, no account, no analytics, and nothing you scan ever leaves your Mac. The app makes no calls to the internet. The one exception is entirely local and opt-in: if you enable the optional AI-assist feature, it talks only to a model running on your own machine (loopback) — a remote address is rejected before any connection is made.
What happens if it moves something I needed?
Nothing is deleted by execution — approved moves land in a quarantine with a checksummed journal. Rollback restores originals and verifies every byte.
Is this another subscription?
No. $29 once. Subscriptions make sense for services; this is a tool.
Why should I trust the claims here?
Don't — verify. The SHA-256 and Gatekeeper commands above prove the artifact; the receipts and rollback journal prove the behavior on your own files, on your first run.
Refunds?
14 days, no drive contents required — if the app can't run on a supported Mac or materially fails the described workflow, you get your money back.