Getting Started

Vault Therapist is an Obsidian plugin that reads your notes and finds what you've forgotten, what contradicts itself, and what's missing. It runs four AI-powered analyses on your vault and surfaces the results inside Obsidian — without requiring you to leave your writing environment.

It's designed for knowledge workers, researchers, students, and anyone who has accumulated a vault large enough that maintaining a coherent mental model has become difficult. If you have hundreds of notes and a nagging sense that important ideas are slipping through the cracks, Vault Therapist is for you.

The plugin works by sending your note content to an AI provider of your choice — or keeping everything local with Ollama. It never stores your notes externally, and the license server only ever sees your license key, never your content.

Obsidian 1.4+ required. Desktop only — mobile support is planned for a future release once on-device embedding performance meets the bar.

Install

Method 1

Obsidian Community Plugins

The easiest way to install. No files to download manually.

  1. Open Obsidian and go to Settings → Community plugins.
  2. If Safe Mode is on, turn it off.
  3. Click Browse and search for Vault Therapist.
  4. Click Install, then Enable.
  5. Open the Vault Therapist settings tab to configure your AI provider.
Method 2

Manual Install

For users who prefer manual control or can't access the community plugin browser.

  1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest GitHub release.
  2. Create the folder <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/vault-therapist/ if it doesn't exist.
  3. Drop all three files into that folder.
  4. Restart Obsidian (or reload without saving).
  5. Go to Settings → Community plugins, find Vault Therapist, and toggle it on.

AI Providers

Vault Therapist supports four AI providers. You can switch between them at any time in the plugin settings — your analyses and vault data are never tied to a specific provider.

Ollama

The fully private option. Ollama runs AI models locally on your machine — nothing leaves your device, there's no API key, and it's free forever. Ideal for large vaults or privacy-sensitive notes.

  1. Install Ollama from ollama.com and follow the platform installer.
  2. Open a terminal and pull a model. A good starting point:
    ollama pull gemma3:4b
    For better analysis quality at the cost of more RAM:
    ollama pull mistral
  3. Ensure the Ollama server is running:
ollama serve
  1. In Obsidian, go to Settings → Vault Therapist → Provider and select Ollama.
  2. Set the base URL (default: http://localhost:11434).
  3. Select your model from the dropdown.
  4. Click Test connection to verify everything is working.

OpenAI

Best quality-to-speed balance for most use cases. gpt-4o is the recommended model — fast, accurate, and inexpensive for typical vault sizes.

  1. Create an account at platform.openai.com.
  2. Go to API Keys and generate a new key.
  3. In Obsidian, go to Settings → Vault Therapist → Provider and select OpenAI.
  4. Paste your API key into the key field.
  5. Select a model (recommended: gpt-4o).
  6. Click Test connection.

Anthropic

The best choice for Contradiction Detection. Claude models excel at nuanced semantic comparison — finding contradictions that are conceptually inconsistent rather than just lexically opposite.

  1. Create an account at console.anthropic.com.
  2. Go to API Keys and generate a new key.
  3. In Obsidian, go to Settings → Vault Therapist → Provider and select Anthropic.
  4. Paste your API key.
  5. Select a model (recommended: claude-4-5-haiku).
  6. Click Test connection.

OpenRouter

Access dozens of models — including several with free tiers — through a single account and API key. Useful if you want to experiment with different models without managing multiple subscriptions.

  1. Create an account at openrouter.ai.
  2. Add credits or pick a free-tier model (no credits needed for free models).
  3. Go to Keys and generate an API key.
  4. In Obsidian, go to Settings → Vault Therapist → Provider and select OpenRouter.
  5. Paste your API key.
  6. Enter a model ID, for example:
    google/gemma-4-31b-it:free
  7. Click Test connection.

Features

Orphan Finder

Scans your vault for notes with no incoming or outgoing links — notes that have drifted from your knowledge graph. For each orphan, Vault Therapist uses semantic similarity to suggest the most relevant existing notes it could connect to. Trigger it from the command palette with Vault Therapist: Find Orphans, or from the plugin's sidebar panel.

Contradiction Detector

Compares claims across your notes and surfaces pairs that conflict. Each result includes a confidence score and a short explanation of why the two passages were flagged — so you can decide what you actually believe and update the stale note accordingly. Run it via Vault Therapist: Detect Contradictions. For best results, use the Anthropic provider.

Knowledge Gap Finder

Clusters your notes by topic and identifies themes that are thin, implicit, or referenced without being explored. The output is a ranked list of suggested topics to write about next. Trigger it with Vault Therapist: Find Knowledge Gaps. Runs best on vaults with 100+ notes where topical coverage has naturally become uneven.

Weekly Insight Report

Generates a digest of recurring themes, emerging patterns, and what you've been writing about lately. Run it on demand with Vault Therapist: Generate Insight Report, or set a schedule in settings to receive it automatically each week. The report is written into a dated note in a configurable folder inside your vault.

FAQ

Does my note content leave my machine?

Only if you choose a cloud provider. With Ollama, all processing happens locally and nothing leaves your device. If you use OpenAI, Anthropic, or OpenRouter, your note content is sent to their respective APIs under their own privacy policies. The Vault Therapist license server only ever sees your license key — never your note content.

Which AI provider should I pick?

Privacy first: Ollama. Best results for price: OpenAI gpt-4o. Best contradiction detection: Anthropic claude-3-5-haiku. Many models, one bill: OpenRouter. You can switch providers at any time without losing your settings.

What happens when the trial expires?

Analyses are gated, but the plugin keeps loading cleanly. Your settings stay accessible, no data is lost, and it uninstalls cleanly if you decide not to continue. You won't be prompted with interruptions — the plugin simply waits for a license key to be entered in settings.

Can I use it on mobile?

Desktop only for now. Mobile Obsidian support is on the roadmap — it's blocked on on-device embedding performance reaching an acceptable level. Watch the GitHub repository for updates.

Is the source code available?

Yes. The plugin is licensed under BUSL-1.1 — you can read and modify it freely for non-production use. It converts to Apache 2.0 on 2030-04-15, at which point it becomes fully open source. The repository is on GitHub.

What about refunds?

14-day no-questions refund via Lemon Squeezy. Reply to your purchase confirmation email and it's done — no support ticket, no friction.

License & Privacy

License

Vault Therapist is licensed under the Business Source License 1.1 (BUSL-1.1). This means:

  • You can read and modify the source for non-production use.
  • You cannot redistribute it or use it in a competing commercial product.
  • The license automatically converts to Apache 2.0 on 2030-04-15, making it fully open source.

The full license text is included in the plugin repository.

Network Disclosure

The plugin makes network requests to exactly two categories of endpoints:

  • Your chosen AI provider — note content is sent here when you run an analysis. With Ollama, this is localhost and nothing leaves your machine.
  • The Vault Therapist license server — contacted at plugin load and once per day to validate your license key. Only the license key is transmitted; note content is never included.

No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting. See the Privacy Policy for full details.