Ethos

Ontoplano is one app for a whole life: the week, the tasks, the notes, the home, the money. These are the rules it keeps while doing that. When a feature and one of these disagree, the feature changes.

Your life is yours

Everything you write can be exported, with its pictures, and imported again somewhere else. Everything can be deleted, and deleting means gone. You can run your own instance on your own machine, or keep the whole app on your phone with no server at all. The code is AGPL-3.0, so that stays true of every copy.

One place, one way of doing things

A to-do, a note, a thing in the cupboard and a bill are different objects that live in the same app, so they behave the same way. A row looks like every other row. j and k walk every list. Anything you can create, you can edit, rename, reorder and delete. A thing put aside is archived, whatever room it is in. Learning one room means knowing all of them.

A subject you are working through — a renovation, a trip, a book — is a notebook, and it holds whatever that subject collects: its tasks, its notes, its shopping, its bills, its goals. The point of one app is that these stop living in five.

Writing it down is faster than forgetting it

Capture is one gesture: hold the button in the bar, flick towards what it is, type. Closing the box halfway keeps what you wrote. The fastest path in the app is the one you take ten times a day.

Nothing moves under your finger

Pressing something never shifts what you were about to press next. Space for anything that can appear is kept before it appears; a count that changes holds its width; a press is answered on screen before the server answers it. An app you can trust is one where the button is where it was a moment ago.

Opinions are opt-in

Some features are one person's way of living: three daily wins, a quote on the dashboard. Those start off, and turning them on is a choice in your preferences. A new account opens on something plain that it can grow into.

An assistant is welcome, never required

Ontoplano works completely without AI. When you do connect one, it gets a key with exactly the permissions you tick, and that key can be tied to a single notebook. Deleting is a separate grant you have to give on purpose. Every change an assistant makes is answered with what was there before, so it can be undone.

Colour is yours

The bright colours in the app belong to your categories and tags. The app's own chrome stays quiet so it never competes with them. Colour is never the only cue: anything coloured also carries its word, and the app never relies on telling red from green.