About Orchard for macOS

Who builds Orchard

Orchard for macOS is designed and written by okooo5km (十里), an independent developer based in China who has been shipping native Mac software for years under 5KM Tech, LLC. There is no growth team and no investor roadmap behind Orchard: one person writes the Swift, answers the support mail, and decides what the next release should do. That is deliberate. A tool that reads your calendar, your inbox, and your messages should be built by someone who has to answer for every line of it.

If you want to see how that person thinks in public, the best places are @okooo5km on X and GitHub.

Why Orchard exists

By 2025, AI assistants were excellent at talking about your day and useless at touching it. Claude could draft the reminder; it could not put it in Reminders. ChatGPT could summarize the meeting; it could not move it on your calendar. Every "agent" demo ended at the edge of the chat window, because the data that actually runs a Mac user's life lives in Apple's own apps, behind Apple's own permission system, with no cloud API on the other side.

Orchard closes that gap from the Mac's side rather than the cloud's. It wraps EventKit, MusicKit, WeatherKit, MapKit, and the scripting bridges of Mail, Messages, Notes, Contacts, and Shortcuts into 52 local tools across 11 Apple apps, and hands those tools to whichever AI client you prefer. The assistant does the understanding; Orchard does the doing; your Mac keeps the data.

Three channels, one app

Orchard does not ask you to switch assistants. It meets the one you already have through whichever integration standard that assistant speaks:

• Agent Skills for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, ChatGPT Desktop, and Craft Agents — installed from the app in one click, with usage guidance baked into the Skill.
• The orchard CLI for your terminal and for any agent that can run a shell command — every tool as a subcommand with structured JSON output.
• The Orchard MCP server (orchard mcp) for Cursor, Claude Cowork, and any other client that speaks the Model Context Protocol over stdio.

All three paths reach the same running copy of Orchard.app and the same permission grants, so enabling an app once is enough no matter how many clients you connect.

Privacy is an architecture decision, not a policy page

Most "local" AI integrations still run a small HTTP server on your machine. Orchard runs none. Tool calls travel over a local Unix domain socket between the CLI and Orchard.app; there is no listening TCP port, nothing for a port scanner to find, and nothing to accidentally expose on a coffee-shop network. Orchard never forwards the content of your emails, notes, events, or messages to our servers, because there is no code path that could.

The only service Orchard talks to is the account backend behind this website, and it stores the minimum a subscription needs: your email, your plan, and the identifiers of the devices you have activated. The full breakdown is in the Privacy Architecture guide and the Privacy Policy. Permission prompts come straight from macOS, and Shortcuts that execute anything always require an explicit confirmation.

How it is priced

Reminders, Calendar, and Clock are free on one device with no usage caps — a real free tier, not a trial. Pro unlocks all 11 apps on up to three Macs as a monthly or yearly subscription, and a one-time Lifetime license is $39.99 for people who would rather not rent their tools. Prices on the pricing section come live from Stripe, so what you see there is what you pay.

Other work from the same desk

Orchard is the second Mac app from 5KM Tech. The first, Zipic, is an image compression and format conversion tool built on the same principle — everything happens on your Mac, nothing is uploaded — and it is where much of the on-device engineering behind Orchard was first worked out.

No HTTP server · No open ports · Native Swift · macOS 13 or later