What is Mandala
Mandala is one program that becomes the home of your digital life: your mail and chats, your notes and files, your tasks and calendar, your money and groceries, and the businesses you run. An accomplice works inside it with you, and every important thing it does is governed by rules you can read.
Three ideas
A business is rules plus knowledge. How an order becomes a delivery, who may approve a payment, what a supplier must send: Mandala writes these down as contracts in a small language called DHL, and keeps everything else people know (procedures, contacts, notes) as documents in Goethe vaults. Your company's back office is generated from its rules, and changing a rule changes the software. See Building with DHL.
Your accomplice is yours. Each person defines their own: a neutral assistant, a colleague with a name, or an accomplice with a personality, a face and a voice. It reads what you allow, remembers what matters, drafts and prepares, and acts only within what you have allowed. See Your accomplice.
You own the home. Mandala runs on a Mac, a home server or a VPS that you control. There is no Mandala cloud and no operator who could read or lock your account. Your data, your keys and your accomplice's memory live with you. See Choose where Mandala runs.
What you can do with it today
- Read and answer mail, Telegram and WhatsApp in one place, with each person's conversations together. Communications
- Keep typed notes, contacts and procedures in Goethe vaults, edited live, linked, searchable. Knowledge
- Plan with tasks and a calendar that merge your Google calendars and your notes. Tasks, Agenda
- Track groceries, accounts, transactions and budgets. Personal
- Run payables for a company, with every step signed by who took it. Dashboards
- Talk to your accomplice by text, voice messages or calls; approve what it prepared by saying "yes, send it". Talking with your accomplice, Approvals
- Run coding sessions with Claude Code or Codex from your phone. Code
- Write your own business rules and install them, without a programmer. Tutorial: your first contract
What makes it different
| Mandala | Typical SaaS | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your data lives | Your machine | The vendor's |
| Who can take over your account | Nobody but you | The vendor, on request |
| How business rules are kept | Readable contracts that the engine enforces | Spread across settings and code |
| What the AI may do | Only what you allowed, each act recorded with who, for whom and why | Whatever the integration permits |
| How it is installed | One program, one service | Many services |
Editions
- Workspace — the full product: the app, the accomplice, Goethe vaults and the DHL engine. This manual is mostly about it.
- Server — the DHL engine without the Workspace, for running a business's rules on its own servers. Coming soon as a packaged edition; see The Server edition.