I wanted AI over my notes — not my notes handed to a company.

The itch

Notes are the most personal thing you type — half-formed ideas, meeting gripes, the stuff you're still working out. AI makes them far more useful: tidy the mess, connect the dots, answer a question across months of writing. But almost every tool that does this ships your notes to a company's servers to be stored, read, and often used to improve their models. The better the AI, the more of your inner monologue you hand over. That trade never sat right with me.

The rules I set

So before writing a line of app code, I set three rules Jot wasn't allowed to break:

• You own your data. Plain Markdown in, plain Markdown out — leave whenever, and take everything with you.
• The AI runs on your key, not mine. No middleman sitting between you and the model, and no per-seat markup on someone else's AI.
• There's a mode where nobody but you can read your notes — including me.

Everything else was negotiable. Those three weren't.

Two modes, honestly

Here's the honest tension: real privacy and effortless cross-device sync pull against each other. Rather than fake it, Jot offers both — and tells you exactly what each one costs.

Local mode is end-to-end encrypted in your browser. The key comes from your passphrase and never leaves your device, so there's nothing on my side to read. That also means if you lose the passphrase I genuinely can't recover it — which is why there's a recovery phrase and an optional backup to your own Google Drive. Cloud mode trades that isolation for sync: notes are encrypted at rest and scoped to your account so they follow you across devices. It's the convenient option, and I don't pretend it's end-to-end.

Your key, not mine

The part I'm happiest with is bring-your-own-key AI. You plug in your own key — Mistral (the free default), Groq, Gemini, OpenAI, or Anthropic — and every AI feature runs under your account. There's no per-seat AI markup, and I'm never the broker — in local mode the call goes straight from your browser to the provider. Jot never trains on your notes — though your chosen provider sets its own terms (Groq, OpenAI, and Anthropic don't train on what you send; the free tiers of Mistral and Gemini can, with paid or opt-out ways to stop), so you choose who to trust, instead of me choosing for you.

What I said no to

It would have been easy to bolt on the features that make notes apps sticky — bank-style auto-import, cross-site tracking, endless "growth" nudges. Most of them only work by seeing your data or following you around the web, so I said no. Jot uses cookieless, anonymous analytics and nothing else. The rule is simple: if a feature can only work by reading your notes, it runs on your device or it doesn't ship.