About

About Refine

Refine is a private, offline-first writing assistant for macOS. It has been built and maintained since 2025 by one independent developer, and it is paid for by the people who use it rather than by advertisers or investors.

What Refine is

Refine checks grammar and fluency, rewrites and translates text, and explains its suggestions inside the Mac apps you already write in. Its default models run on your own machine, so once a local model is downloaded, checking your writing needs no internet connection and sends your text to no server.

Most writing assistants are cloud services: your draft leaves your computer, is processed elsewhere, and is billed every month for as long as you keep writing. Refine was built on the opposite assumption. Processing belongs on your Mac, and a writing tool should be something you buy once.

You can still hand specific tasks to a hosted AI provider you configure yourself. When you do, the request goes directly from your Mac to that provider and your API key stays in the macOS keychain. Refine does not route that traffic through its own servers.

Who builds Refine

Runju Huang

Independent developer, Canada

Refine is a one-person product. The same person writes the app, the website, and the replies to support email. There is no sales team and no investor timeline, which is why the roadmap stays narrow and the privacy boundaries stay simple enough to describe in a paragraph.

What Refine commits to

  • Local by default

    Grammar checks, rewrites, and translations run on your Mac using downloaded models. Your writing is not collected, stored, or used to train anything.

  • Bought once, not rented

    A single purchase covers all future releases. A full-featured seven-day trial comes first, and students and educators can request 30% off.

  • Open at the edges

    The Refine Integration Protocol and the official Obsidian, Neovim, and PopClip plugins are published in the open, so other editors can integrate without asking permission.

Refine at a glance

Founded
2025
First public release
Refine 1.0, July 2025
Platform
macOS 14.0 or later
Interface languages
English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish
Pricing
One-time license, no subscription
Operated from
Canada
Contact
support@refine.sh

Where to go next

Continue with the product itself, the integration protocol, the privacy policy, or a direct reply.