Privacy and costs
What is sent where, what costs money and where your files are kept.
What leaves your machine#
Topic Map makes no network requests of its own. Every model call goes through Model Hub, to the providers you set up there.
| What is sent | When |
|---|---|
| The text of each passage | Indexing, and previewing or indexing a book that needs a model to find its parts |
| A sample of each document | A survey |
| The text of each card | Embedding, during indexing |
| Your question, and any seeds | Search, finding topics and drafting |
| The cards and passages a draft uses | Drafting |
Which provider receives them is decided in Model Hub. With a local provider there, nothing leaves your computer.
Book files come through Library Hub, which talks to your Calibre Content Server.
Tools for other apps. When Model Hub's MCP server is on and a client such as Claude Code calls Topic Map's tools, the cards, anchors and passages it asks for go to that client's model. See Your collections in Claude.
Traces. Model Hub can send traces of its calls to an OpenTelemetry collector you run. It is off unless you turn it on in Model Hub's settings, and the address is yours. Topic Map's work shows there as topic-map: each job (an index, Find topics, a survey, a draft) is one run, with its model calls under it. A trace holds each call's role, model, tokens, cost and outcome (and a failed call's error message), not the text sent or the reply. Each call is labeled with what it's about, which names the collection and, while indexing, the book or note and the passage number.
Topic Map sends no telemetry of its own, and there are no ads.
What costs money#
Keep up to date, when you turn it on for a collection, starts index runs on its own as its source changes. They count against a daily limit in Setup (one dollar by default), which also counts only money that's charged, and show in Jobs with their cost.
Topic Map is free. The providers you set up in Model Hub may bill you for each call.
- Indexing is the large cost: one call per passage, plus embedding the cards.
- A survey, naming topics and a draft each make a handful of calls. Topic names are kept beside the index and reused while a topic's cards stay the same, so finding topics again costs only what changed.
- Search embeds your question, which costs a tiny fraction of a cent.
Before any of these, Topic Map shows a dry run with what it would do, and an estimate for indexing and drafts. A run can stop at a spend limit you set; it counts only money that's charged, so calls a subscription covers don't use it up. Model Hub's limits and budgets apply too, and its usage view shows what Topic Map has spent.
Where things are kept#
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Indexes: passages, cards, vectors, kept topic names and run logs | .obsidian/plugins/topic-map/corpora/ |
| Map caches (neighbors and layout, rebuilt when needed) | map/ inside each collection’s index folder; the library map’s in corpora/library/map/library/ |
| Collection notes | The folder you choose; Topic Map by default |
| Topic notes | Topic Map/Topics by default |
| Drafts | Topic Map/Drafts by default |
| Your lenses | Model Hub's skills folder |
| Graph view color groups | graph.json in the vault's configuration folder, beside your own groups |
Uninstalling Topic Map deletes every index. Your notes stay.
Files outside the vault#
Topic Map reads nothing outside the vault.