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Cloud-first drift
Many apps treat local storage as a cache. Jot treats your device as the source of truth first, then layers sync carefully.
Why Jot
Notes should stay yours,
even when they get smarter.
Jot is built around two things most notes apps treat as tradeoffs: speed of capture and ownership of data. You shouldn't have to pick one. Local-first storage, Markdown you can move anywhere, and AI features that stay optional — that's the baseline. On top of that: visual editing, AI-assisted daily planning, wikilinks, projects, voice capture, and a built-in MCP server for power users who want to wire Jot into their tooling.
Jot Principles
Default storage
On-device
Primary format
Markdown
AI posture
Explicit + optional
The goal is durable notes, not forced lock-in.
The problem
Most notes apps ask for trust up front.
They start in the cloud, blur the line between convenience and lock-in, and make export feel secondary. That is backwards for personal knowledge.
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Opaque AI tradeoffs
AI features often arrive without a clear boundary between local notes and provider-managed processing. Jot aims to make that boundary explicit.
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Lock-in by design
When notes live in a custom silo, switching becomes painful. Markdown keeps your writing portable and resilient.
What Jot optimizes for
Capture first. Plan well. Keep control the whole time.
- Fast capture: text, voice, Share Extension — ideas land the moment they hit
- Daily planning: AI-assisted Plan My Day, Focus Mode, break reminders, and Live Activities on the lock screen
- Visual editing: floating format toolbar, slash commands, and a visual task builder — Markdown underneath
- Project structure: README-as-hub, notes folder, wikilinks, and unlinked mention detection
- Safety nets: version history and local persistence reduce the cost of mistakes
- Deliberate AI: chat, summaries, and planning help — opt-in, your API key, nothing leaves by default
- MCP interop: connect Jot to AI tooling and automation as a local server
- Portable future: Markdown exports that support ownership, not lock-in
Who Jot is for
- People who want fast capture across iPhone and Mac without cloud dependency
- Markdown users who want polished mobile and desktop UX without giving up portability
- Writers, builders, and researchers who care about offline reliability
- Daily planners who want AI help without handing over their data
- Power users who want to wire notes into automation and AI tooling via MCP
- Anyone who wants AI as a tool, not as the product owner of their notes
Important nuance
Jot is still evolving, and that matters.
A trustworthy product page should not pretend unfinished systems are done. The website needs to stay honest about what is live, what is in beta, and what is still in rollout.
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Windows is still coming to beta
macOS is available on the Mac App Store. Windows is still being stabilized and is not yet ready for a public beta download.
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Feature messaging needs precision
Roadmaps can evolve, so date-specific or overconfident copy hurts trust faster than it helps conversion.
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GitHub is the public heartbeat today
Until official social channels exist, release notes, Discussions, and the website need to do most of the discovery work.
Try Jot
Start with local-first notes on iPhone or Mac.
If Jot’s approach matches how you think about ownership and speed, the best next step is to try the App Store build and follow releases as the product grows.