A small light that makes everything feel alive.
Catchlight wasn't designed in a boardroom. It came from one person's frustration, a studio with two stubborn ideas, and a name borrowed from old cinema.
The privacy promise millions of people had relied on quietly broke.
When Apple removed Advanced Data Protection for UK users in early 2025, the alternatives were either too complex, too limited, or too unpleasant to use every day.
The problem was never really about privacy. It was about finding something that felt as good as what you'd left.
Why leave privacy to corporations when you can be in control? Catchlight is your answer.
You can have both beauty and function, you just have to be willing to try.
Considus is a small independent studio with two simple ideas: apps should be functional, private, and beautifully crafted, and you should always be in control of your data.
Catchlight started as a personal frustration, one person who'd lost trust in their notes and reminders app and couldn't find anything worth switching to. Functionality in a beautiful form is difficult to find.
A technique invented out of love.
The name comes from the movies. A catchlight is the small specular reflection of light in a subject's eyes, the thing that makes a portrait feel alive rather than flat. The technique was invented by cinematographer Lucien Ballard for his wife, actress Merle Oberon, a way of drawing light to what mattered most in the frame.
A catchlight is also known as an Obie. After her.
In Catchlight, your most important Take is called an Obie too. The one thing in your frame that matters most. Pinned. Elevated. Catching the light.
The name wasn't invented. It was found, the same way the technique was. And it felt like the right thing to build.
I'm building Catchlight because I got tired of the app I used every day. It looked fine and it was okay to use, but always felt like it missed the things I wanted.
I tried many solutions, but too many seem to be made by developers, that's not a slight, but the apps were function over form, or just too feature-rich to actually be used. If you've tried a few, I'm guessing you'll know what I mean.
The final straw was when the privacy protection a lot of us relied on quietly disappeared. I'd been looking for somewhere else to keep my notes and reminders, but, as I said, nothing quite worked for me.
Everything private enough was a chore to use. Everything pleasant to use wanted an account, a subscription, and a copy of my data. That never felt like a fair trade. I've always tended towards privacy, not because I've something to hide, of course, but more because I've grown to hate that my life and my data have become assets for 'big tech' (well, and 'little tech') to buy and sell like I'm a commodity. Reading this, I suspect you get a sense of my frustration!
So when I finally decided to resolve the issue for myself, the brief was simple, even if the build wasn't: create something genuinely private and genuinely nice to use, in fact, it has to be beautiful too.
If it takes more than a second or two to save a thought, I stop using it, so capture had to be instant. It had to be mine, and only mine. My usual test for whether an app is worth trusting is this: would it still work if the company behind it vanished tomorrow? The answer for most apps is, no. Catchlight will, and it has to.
Your Takes, my name for captured thoughts (notes, tasks and reminders feel ordinary), are kept on your device, encrypted with a key only you hold, on your phone, wherever you take it. No servers to connect to, no account to create, just your thoughts, on your device, safeguarded by your key.
I'm building it slowly, in the open (yes, the code can be viewed by anyone), and I'd rather it be simple and yours than powerful and complicated. If that's the trade you've been looking for too, join the list, and I'll tell you the day it's ready.
I feel I should mention price. No, Catchlight isn't free, and I'd rather be open about why. I have a small team, and the only thing funding this app is the people who use it. I'll never sell your data to advertisers, take on investors looking for a huge return, or sell you out, ever.
I hate monthly subscriptions, so although not a perfect solution, I'm offering Catchlight for a fair annual price. My promise to those who use it: this pricing model stays. It'll be updated, but only with features that never break my rules. Your subscription is what keeps us independent and keeps the app free of ads and tracking, so the freedom to keep improving rests entirely on the people who use it. Around £14.99 a year, a real free trial first, test and use all the features, and if you ever stop paying, you keep everything you wrote.
That's it. That's the deal. We make something wonderful, you get the value you pay for, and we keep trying to inspire.
MarkFounder · Considus