The best place on your
Mac to think in text.
Margin is a local-first markdown notes app for the Mac. An editor that feels lovely under the fingers. Spaces that keep the day job away from the novel. Notes that point at each other. And an AI that sits quietly until you jab it with a cursor. Your notes stay ordinary files on your Mac, which is the least dramatic and most reassuring thing about it.
Free during the alpha. When 1.0 ships, everything keeps working for 30 days, and alpha users get 25% off a lifetime licence until then.
Typing in it is the reason you will stay.
We fixed roughly a hundred tiny annoyances you had stopped noticing in every other notes app. You will not be able to name them. You will just find yourself typing more.
Work does not belong in the same drawer as dinner.
Each space is its own folder, its own note list, its own search, and its own tint, so the whole app quietly changes colour when you switch. Client work here, the side project there, the reading pile somewhere else entirely. One click and the other three stop existing for a while.
Move a note to another space and it moves as a file — same note, same identity, new folder. Links live inside a space, so the one thing to redo by hand is a link that crossed a boundary; within a space, renames repoint themselves.
Notes that point at each other.
Start typing a note's name and link straight to it. Rename that note later and every mention of it quietly updates, because chasing broken links is nobody's idea of a good evening.
You can also grab a link to a note and drop it in a calendar invite or a ticket. Click it, Margin opens, right note, right place. And ⇧⌘O does the same trick for everything else: every command and every note in one list, without touching the mouse.
Your prompts, your model, your machine.
Write your own actions once and they live in the menu forever: "make this a tweet", "turn this into a changelog entry", "answer this in my voice". Each one decides where its result goes, including straight onto the clipboard. Every change arrives as a diff you say yes to first.
Then pick who does the work. A frontier model on your own API key, the CLI agent already installed on your Mac, or a model running entirely on the machine. The actions are the same either way.
Built to developer standards. Not for developers only.
We built the notes app we wanted for ourselves, which meant being fussy about the things developers get fussy about: it starts instantly, it never blocks on a spinner, your notes are ordinary files, and nothing is hidden behind a service.
None of that asks anything of you. Open it, type, close it. It behaves exactly like a notes app should. The deeper end is there when you want it: keep a space inside a repo, drive it from Shortcuts or Raycast, wire it to a hotkey. Ignore all of it and nothing is missing.
More is coming for the tinkerers, because we are the tinkerers. Everyone else gets the same app, quietly getting faster.
Open, in alpha.
This is early. The editor and the AI actions are solid; the corners are not all sanded yet. Updates arrive inside the app. If something breaks, tell us; that is the whole point of an alpha.
Free, for now. The alpha costs nothing. Margin 1.0 will be paid, one-time or by subscription, and alpha users keep everything for 30 days after it ships, with 25% off a lifetime licence. Your notes are files in your folders and never lock.
Support development. From day one, Settings › Licence sells an early-supporter lifetime licence for $45. It activates the day 1.0 ships, covers two Macs, and the price you pay is the price you keep. Fourteen days, no questions, if it turns out not to be for you.
No account, ever. Nothing to sign up for. Purchases go through Polar and Margin activates itself; on a second Mac you ask for a link by email.
Feedback. Help › Send Feedback… inside the app, or [email protected]. A person reads it.
Not ready for an alpha? Leave an address and you will hear once, when 1.0 ships.
Where your notes live, plainly
Your notes are files on your disk. Plain markdown, in a folder you choose. No account is needed to read or write them, and deleting Margin leaves every note exactly where it was.
Nothing leaves your Mac unless you ask. The AI does nothing on its own — no indexing in the background, no reading as you type. When you invoke it, only what you point it at goes to the model you configured, and if you never invoke it, nothing is sent anywhere, ever.
What leaves your Mac is short. Anonymous usage statistics that help find crashes, with nothing from your notes in them, and Settings › Privacy switches them off. An address left below is used once, when 1.0 ships. The privacy policy lists all of it.
Margin
Made on a Mac, for a Mac, mostly on weekends.