One Vault to Rule Them All

Open your laptop right now and count the apps holding your stuff. Google Slides for that pitch deck. PowerPoint for the client presentation. Apple Notes for the grocery list. Obsidian for the project wiki. Figma for the wireframes. iMovie for the vacation video. Notion for the team standup notes. Google Docs for that shared report.

Your digital life is scattered across a dozen applications, each with its own storage, its own format, its own rules. You don’t organize your work. Your tools organize it for you, and they do a terrible job.

The tool shapes the document

This is the fundamental problem nobody talks about. We’ve accepted that if you want to make a presentation, you open a presentation app. If you want to edit a video, you open a video editor. If you want to write notes, you open a notes app. Each tool claims ownership over a file type, and your documents live wherever that tool decides to put them.

PowerPoint files live in OneDrive. Google Slides live in Google Drive. Keynote files live in iCloud. Three presentation tools, three file systems, three login screens. And none of them know about the research notes you wrote before building the deck, or the video clip you want to embed, or the drawing you sketched on your tablet during the meeting.

Your knowledge is fragmented not because you’re disorganized, but because the tools force fragmentation.

You don’t own your stuff

Here’s the part that stings. Most of these tools are services, not software. Your to-do lists live on Todoist’s servers. Your notes live in Notion’s database. Your drawings live in Procreate’s ecosystem or Concepts’ cloud. Your presentations live in Google’s infrastructure. You’re renting access to your own work.

Cancel a subscription and watch what happens. Your Notion pages become read-only. Your Todoist tasks vanish behind a paywall. Your Figma files need to be exported one by one before you lose access. Years of creative work, held hostage by monthly payments.

And the mess compounds over time. A drawing you made in Procreate three years ago. Meeting notes from a Notion workspace you left. A presentation in Google Slides from a project that moved to PowerPoint. A to-do list split between Apple Reminders, Todoist, and a sticky note on your monitor. Each tool promised to be the one place for something, and now you have twelve “one places” and no idea where anything is.

This isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s a tax on creativity. Every time you want to make something, you first have to figure out which app to open, whether you still have access, and whether it can talk to the other things you’ve already made. You end up paying hundreds of dollars a year across subscriptions just to be creative with your own content.

The document should shape the tool

What if it worked the other way around?

You have a folder. Inside that folder are your notes, your drawings, your presentations, your videos, your images. They’re files on your filesystem, organized the way you think, not the way some product manager decided. When you open a note, you get a markdown editor. When you open a presentation, you get a slide editor. When you open a video project, you get a timeline. Same app, same vault, same place.

That’s Notidian.

What this actually looks like

In Notidian, your vault is a folder on your device. Everything lives there. Notes are markdown files. Drawings are stored alongside the notes they belong to. Presentations, video projects, and other rich documents live as bundles — folders that contain their assets and metadata in open formats.

You don’t “import” a file into Notidian. You don’t “export” to get it out. Your files are already there, on disk, in formats other tools can read. If you stop using Notidian tomorrow, you still have a folder of markdown, images, and media files. Nothing is locked away. No subscription to cancel. No data to rescue before a deadline.

But while you’re using Notidian, those files get the full treatment. Open a note and draw on it with a GPU-accelerated canvas. Open a presentation and arrange slides with transitions. Open a video project and cut clips on a timeline. The tool adapts to the document, not the other way around.

AI-ready by default

There’s a reason this matters right now. We’re entering an era where AI assistants can help you search, summarize, rewrite, and organize your work. But they can only help if they can read your files.

Try pointing an AI at a .pptx file. It’s a zip archive of XML blobs and binary media. A .key file is even worse. Proprietary formats were designed for applications to read, not for humans or AI to understand.

Notidian stores everything in markdown with YAML frontmatter. Plain text. Structured metadata. The most AI-friendly format that exists. Your notes, your presentation slides, your video project timelines — all of it is readable by any AI assistant, any script, any tool you build on top of your vault.

This isn’t a feature we bolted on. It’s a consequence of the file format choice. When your data is markdown and YAML instead of proprietary binary, your entire vault becomes a knowledge base that AI can actually work with. Ask an assistant to find every note that references a project. Summarize a week of meeting notes. Generate a presentation outline from your research. It all works because the files are plain text, not opaque blobs locked behind a parser only one company maintains.

The tools that store your work in proprietary formats are betting against the future. The AI revolution rewards open, readable data. Your vault should be ready for it.

The greed tax

Let’s talk about what’s really going on. The software industry discovered that subscriptions print money, and they got greedy.

CapCut was free. Completely free. Millions of creators built their workflows around it. Then ByteDance flipped the switch: $7.99/month, basic features behind a paywall. The entire growth of CapCut was built on being “the free alternative,” and overnight it became another subscription.

This is not an isolated case. It’s the playbook.

Adobe sold Photoshop as a one-time purchase for $699. In 2013, they killed perpetual licenses and moved to Creative Cloud at $20.99/month for Photoshop alone, $54.99/month for the full suite. A Change.org petition against it gathered 50,000 signatures. In 2024, the FTC sued Adobe for hiding early termination fees and making it deliberately difficult to cancel. The company that makes the tools you depend on was actively trying to trap you.

Evernote had a generous free tier for years. Then Bending Spoons bought it, gutted the free plan to 50 notes and 1 notebook, raised prices to $14.99/month, and laid off most of the staff. The subreddit turned into a migration support forum.

Unity announced a retroactive per-install fee in 2023 — charging developers $0.20 for every install of games they’d already shipped. The CEO resigned within weeks. The stock dropped 16%.

Photobucket went from free image hosting to demanding $399/year for embedding, breaking billions of images across the internet overnight.

LastPass restricted its free tier to one device type, pushing users toward $3/month — right before two major security breaches made everyone question why they were paying at all.

Figma changed billing so that anyone who edits even once counts as a “full seat,” surprising teams with bills far larger than expected.

The pattern is always the same: get users hooked for free, build dependency, then monetize. It’s not a business model. It’s a trap.

There is another way

Not every company plays this game. Some have proven that you can build sustainable software without extracting rent from your users.

Procreate charges $12.99. Once. Over 40 million copies sold. Their CEO said it plainly: “Procreate will never go subscription. We don’t think that’s a fair way to treat our customers.” A team of around 100 people in Tasmania, profitable without venture capital, building one of the most loved creative tools in the world.

Affinity sells Photo, Designer, and Publisher for $69.99 each, or $169.99 for all three on all platforms. One-time. Their CEO: “We believe customers should be able to buy software and own it.” They compete directly with Adobe’s $660/year Creative Cloud suite.

DaVinci Resolve gives away a professional video editor for free. The Studio version is $295, once, with free major updates forever. That’s less than what Adobe charges for Premiere Pro in a single year.

These companies aren’t charities. They’re profitable businesses that chose to respect their users instead of farming them. They prove that the subscription model isn’t inevitable — it’s a choice. A choice driven by investors who want recurring revenue, not by what’s best for the people using the software.

Why nobody built this before

Two reasons.

First, it’s genuinely hard. A notes app, a drawing engine, a presentation editor, and a video editor are four separate products. Building them under one roof with a consistent UX requires a shared rendering foundation. Notidian’s WebGPU engine provides that — the same GPU pipeline that renders brush strokes also renders slide transitions and video previews.

Second, the business model discourages it. When you sell five separate subscriptions, you make five times the money. Adobe sells Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, and InDesign as separate line items. The industry profits from fragmentation. Every app boundary is a subscription line.

Notidian doesn’t have that incentive. It’s a single tool with a one-time purchase. There’s no reason to split features into separate products. No investors to please. No quarterly revenue targets to hit. Just the goal of building the tool that should have existed all along.

The vault is the operating system

Once all your documents live in one place, something interesting happens. Your notes can reference your presentations. Your presentations can embed your drawings. Your video projects can pull from your media library. Everything is linked, searchable, and visible in one file explorer.

This is what “Notidian OS” means. Not a literal operating system, but the idea that your vault becomes the single environment where you create, organize, and find everything. One search bar. One file tree. One app.

No more switching between apps to find the thing you made last week. No more re-downloading a file because it’s trapped in some cloud tool’s proprietary storage. No more wondering which app has the latest version.

Your vault. Your files. Your structure. One place for everything.

Why I’m building this

I built Notidian because I was tired of being the victim.

Tired of my notes trapped in Notion. My drawings scattered across Procreate and Concepts. My presentations split between Google Slides and PowerPoint. My to-do lists in three different apps. My creative work spread across a dozen tools, each demanding a monthly fee for the privilege of accessing my own stuff.

I wanted one app. One place where I could write, draw, present, edit, organize — everything. Not five tools stitched together with export buttons. One tool that understood all my documents because they all lived in the same vault, in the same open format, under my control.

Nobody was building it. So I built it myself.

Notidian is the result of what I always wanted. It’s my masterpiece. And if I’m honest, it’s probably the only app I’ll ever need. That’s the bar I’m building toward — not “good enough for a notes app” or “impressive for a side project,” but the single tool where everything I create lives, grows, and stays mine.

No greed. No subscription traps. No pleasing investors. No stripping away features to sell them back to you. Just the app that should have existed all along, built by someone who needed it as badly as you do.

Where we are today

Notidian already handles notes with markdown editing and GPU-accelerated drawing. The presentation editor and video editor are in active development, following the same pattern: files on disk, rendered with the shared WebGPU engine, integrated into the vault’s file explorer.

This isn’t a roadmap promise. The architecture is built. The content type system is running. Each new document type plugs into the same vault, the same tabs, the same search. The pieces are coming together.

We’re not building five apps. We’re building one vault that opens everything. And you’ll never need to pay five subscriptions just to be creative with your own content again.