Why I built my own notes app
I tried everything. Nothing stuck. So I built the thing I actually wanted — and it turned out I wasn't the only one who needed it.
I have tried probably every notes app that exists.
Notion — too much setup before I can write a single thought. I’d spend twenty minutes building a database and forget what I was originally trying to capture. Obsidian — powerful, but the graph becomes a maze fast, and I’m not a person who wants to maintain a second brain as a hobby. Apple Notes — great for quick capture, useless for anything with structure. Roam, Bear, Things, Day One — each solves part of the problem and introduces a new one.
The pattern I kept running into: every app wants you to decide where something goes before you’ve even finished the thought. You open it, and the first question is always organizational. Folder? Tag? Project? Inbox?
That friction is the thing that kills it for me. By the time I’ve decided where to put the idea, I’ve half-forgotten it.
So I built something for myself.
The core idea is simple: one bar, always there, no decisions required. You type. It goes in. The app figures out the structure later — links ideas that belong together, surfaces duplicates, flags things that are going stale. You get a graph, but you don’t have to build it. You get organization, but you don’t have to do it upfront.
I called it Cairn. A cairn is a stack of stones — a marker, a signal, something built incrementally to help you find your way. That felt right.
I used it myself for months before I showed it to anyone. At some point I mentioned it in passing to a few people and the response was immediate: “wait, can I use that?”
That’s when I understood it wasn’t just me. The frustration with existing tools isn’t niche. A lot of people have tried everything, found something missing, and quietly given up — they just write in their phone’s native notes app and accept the chaos, or they use Notion because it’s what the internet tells them to use, even though it doesn’t match how they actually think.
Cairn is now open to everyone. You can use it locally for free, forever — no account needed, no cloud. If you want sync or the AI features (which use Claude, for what it’s worth), there are paid tiers for that.
I want to be honest about where it is right now: early.
The core experience is there and it works, but the app is still going through the process of getting properly signed and certified for distribution — Apple developer accounts, Windows signing, the whole chain of trust that makes your computer not throw a warning when you download something. That process takes time and money that’s still being sorted.
If you download it now and see a security warning, that’s why. It’s not malware — it’s just not yet wearing the official badge that tells your OS it’s been vouched for. I’m working through it.
The roadmap is straightforward: get the trust infrastructure sorted, add a mobile app, keep making the core capture experience faster and smarter.
If you want to follow along — or if you’re someone who tried it and has thoughts — I’d genuinely like to hear from you.