Your notes should belong to you

Every note-taking app of the last decade has made the same trade without ever putting it to the reader: the software got better, and the content moved onto somebody else's server. It is a trade that costs nothing at all until the day it costs everything — a price change, an acquisition, an outage, a company that simply stops.

The answers to that have mostly asked you to give up something else instead. Tools that take privacy and sovereignty seriously tend to be thinner where the work actually happens: a weaker editor, collaboration missing or bolted on afterwards, and keeping your own two machines in step left to a folder you have to think about. That is not the trade being refused. It is the same trade run the other way.

We did not want to give up either half. A workspace should have a real editor, real structure, real collaboration, and it should hold all of that on your own disk, under keys nobody else has. So the question we started from was whether both of those were possible at once, and the answer turned out to be yes, provided you decide it at the beginning rather than bolting it on.

So Ubimate runs on your machine and keeps its data in a format you can read without it. Sync and live collaboration both exist, and both are encrypted before anything leaves your device, which means the part we operate is a relay that cannot read what it relays. None of that depends on us keeping our word: it is how the thing is built, and the security page is where the details are written down.