Your notes shouldn’t need an account

Ask yourself why a notes app needs your email before it’ll let you write a single word. It isn’t for you. Not really.

Privacy · 2 min read

An account is rarely there to serve you. It’s there so the app has a copy of you, a handle it can attach your data to, market to, and hold onto if you ever try to leave. The note-taking is the bait, the account is the hook, and we’ve all got so used to it that the sign-up screen barely registers any more.

Catchlight doesn’t have one. No sign-up, no email, no password to reset, no profile sitting on a server with your name against it. You download Catchlight, and you start writing. That’s the bones of it.

Why this one matters more than most

Notes and reminders are some of the most personal data you own, and they’re the easiest to quietly leave in a big-tech cloud, even while you’re careful about everything else. People lock down their email, move off Google, get fussy about which messenger they use, and still leave a decade of private thinking in a notes app that read every word years ago. Not because they don’t care. Because nothing private ever felt as easy, so the notes got left till last.

Here’s the bit worth sitting with. If there’s no account, there’s nothing to breach in the usual way, nothing to sell, nothing to hand over, and nothing to hold your notes hostage if your subscription lapses. You can’t leak a database of users you never built.

But “free” has a bill too

The obvious answer to all this is to grab a free app and move on. I’d gently push back on that. If you swap Google for another ad-funded free app, you’ll just end up back where you started, the product all over again, only now it’s your notes.

That’s the honest trade behind Catchlight not being free. A small fee from the people who use it is the only thing funding the app, which means I never have to make you the thing being sold. No account to build, no data to flog, no investor waiting for a return that has to come out of you, somehow. Your notes stay yours, nobody else’s, and you can lift every one of them out as plain Markdown any time you please.

No account isn’t a missing feature. It is the feature.