Why it works this way

What Scratchpad does differently to other notes apps, and the reasoning behind each choice.

Most of what follows is a decision somebody had to make, and the reasoning matters more than the feature does. If you're choosing between notes apps, this is the honest version.

It opens and it's ready

There's no project to set up, no workspace to configure, and no database to design before you can write a sentence. Open it and the cursor is in a note.

Structure is there the moment you want it, and never before: folders, tags, links between notes, checklists, tables. A note with no folder and no tag is a perfectly good note, and most of them stay that way.

Finding things is the feature

An app where writing is easy and finding is hard becomes a place things go to be lost. ⇧⌘K searches as you type, across everything, including the words inside an attached PDF or Word document and anything you've had transcribed from a recording.

See Finding a note again for what it reads and how to narrow it.

We sell software, not you

There's no advertising anywhere in Scratchpad, nothing about you is sold or shared, and your notes are never used to train AI models. The business model is the subscription, which is why there's nothing to be gained here from knowing what you write.

Page views are counted with our own analytics software on our own server. No third party is involved. Inside the app the address is stripped before it's counted: note identifiers, share tokens, and the page title are all replaced, so what's recorded is that somebody opened a note, never which note. A tracker blocker stops it, and we don't treat that as a problem.

The privacy policy says all of this in the detail a policy has to.

Some notes nobody should read, including us

A locked note is encrypted with a key made from its password. Its text and its version history are stored only in encrypted form, in the database and in every backup, so nothing we keep can be read without the password, or without Face ID or Touch ID if you've set that up to open it. We can't recover a locked note: if the password is lost, the note is lost with it, unless you've set up Face ID or Touch ID to open it.

It isn't end-to-end encryption, though. Your password travels to our server over an encrypted connection, the server does the encrypting and decrypting, and while the note is open it holds the note's key in memory. What the lock protects is everything stored: the database, the backups, and any copy of them.

Four things in a locked note aren't encrypted, and it's better to know than to assume:

• its name, so it can still appear in your list
• its password hint, if you give one
• the wording of any reminder set in it, so the reminder can reach you
• the pictures, recordings, and files in it, which anyone holding their link can open

Everything else travels over encrypted connections, passwords are hashed, and two-step sign-in and passkeys are both available.

Your notes leave whenever you want

Export a note, a folder, or everything at once, as Markdown, plain text or JSON. Not a proprietary archive only this app can read: Markdown files you can open in anything.

That's deliberate. An export that's easy is what makes it possible to leave, and an app that's easy to leave has to be worth staying in. Import works the same way round, from Markdown, Word, HTML, RTF or a whole zip exported from another app.

If you stop paying, or stop entirely

A cancelled plan that runs out, or a payment that fails, pauses the account and keeps your notes. You're emailed before anything would ever be deleted.

Closing the account deletes your notes and files from the servers within thirty days, and from the backups within ninety as those are replaced. Take an export first; see Closing your account.

What it is not

It isn't a wiki, a project manager, or a second brain with a method you have to learn. It's a fast, quiet place to put things you'll want later, with enough structure to find them again.

If that's not what you're after, better to know now than after a week of moving your notes across.

Last updated 26 September 2026