Notez is a note-taking app built for developers, and it is organized around one observation: the note you never capture is the note you lose. Most apps optimize for what happens after a note exists — folders, formatting, databases. Notez optimizes for the two seconds when a thought appears while you are in the middle of something else.
The result is a single vault you can write into from four different surfaces, plus semantic search and an AI assistant that answers questions from what you have saved.
The four capture surfaces
The URL bar
Type notez.dev/your thought into any browser address bar and the URL becomes the note. There is no app to open and, for a first try, no account needed. This sounds like a gimmick until you use it once: the address bar is already focused in a new tab, it exists on every machine, and it costs you nothing to reach.
If the text you type is a URL, Notez detects it and saves it as a bookmark instead of a plain note, keeping the link in the note's metadata.
The terminal
The Notez CLI is a 3 MB native binary for macOS, Linux, and Windows. Once you have run notez login to authorize the terminal, capturing looks like this:
notez "connection pool exhausted when retries stack — check the queue worker"
echo "output worth keeping" | notez
notez --title "Standup" "blocked on the migration review"Because it is a plain binary on your $PATH, it works wherever your shell runs — over SSH, inside tmux, or mid-debug when switching to a GUI would cost you your stack of context. Its --json output makes it scriptable.
AI tools over MCP
Notez exposes your workspace over the Model Context Protocol. Point Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, or any MCP-capable client at it and your assistant can search, read, and write notes in natural language:
"Create a note titled Daily Standup with my blockers for today."
"Find all my notes tagged research and summarize the top 3."
This turns your vault into shared memory. Context you give one AI tool persists across sessions and is visible to every other tool — and to you, in the same vault as everything you captured by hand.
The web dashboard
The web app is where you browse, search, sort, and organize. It has a block-based rich text editor with slash commands, tags, kanban boards, custom properties on notes, sub-notes for hierarchy, file attachments, and note sharing via public links. Everything captured from the other three surfaces lands here, searchable instantly.
There is also a free Mac app for macOS 11 or later, on Apple Silicon and Intel: a window that runs the web app, so Notez sits in the Dock instead of in a browser tab.
Finding things again: search by meaning
Notes you cannot find might as well not exist. Notez indexes your notes with embeddings and runs keyword and semantic search together, so search works by meaning as well as by exact words. Searching for "that caching idea" finds the note where you wrote about memoizing the session lookup, even though the word "caching" never appears in it.
On top of search sits Ask AI (⌘J): a chat that retrieves the relevant notes from your vault and answers with sources. Instead of reconstructing where you wrote something down, you ask the question you actually have — "what have I written about focus and deep work?" — and get an answer grounded in your own notes.
Structure when you want it, none when you don't
Capture in Notez is deliberately unstructured: text in, done. Structure is available afterwards, when you choose to add it:
Tags for cross-cutting labels, managed from the sidebar.
Linked notes: type
[[in the editor to link one note to another. Notez keeps every backlink in sync, so a web of connected notes builds up as you write.Boards with columns, for notes that behave like tasks.
Custom properties that hold a value on every note in a workspace — a date, a number, a select — when a set of notes needs consistent fields.
Sub-notes for hierarchy, and favorites for the handful of notes you open daily.
Workspaces and teams
Notes live in workspaces. You can keep separate workspaces for separate contexts, and invite people by email — members can read and edit every note in the shared workspace. The free plan includes up to three members per workspace; paid plans raise that along with storage.
What it costs
The free plan is free forever, with no credit card: 1 GB of file storage, up to 1,000 notes per workspace, and a monthly allowance of AI tokens for search indexing and chat. Pro ($4.99/month) raises storage to 10 GB, lifts the AI allowances tenfold, and allows larger files and more workspace members. Ultra ($9.99/month) sits above that for heavier usage.
One guarantee holds on every plan: any member can export the whole workspace at any time, as a .zip of markdown files with attachments. Your notes are yours, in a format every other tool can read.
Who it is for
Notez is for people whose thoughts arrive while their hands are busy — developers mid-debug, writers mid-paragraph, anyone whose working day involves a terminal or an AI assistant. If your current system involves a notes app you have to switch to, Notez replaces the switch with a keystroke, and replaces folder archaeology with a search box that understands what you meant.
Continue reading
Why we built Notez — the two problems Notez started from, capture and retrieval, and what it leaves out: co-editing, comments, folders and offline editing.
Why your notes app cannot find your note — how the keyword branch and the semantic branch of Notez search work together, and the two distance thresholds behind a match.
Four ways to get it back: undo, versions, the Bin, and the write that gets refused — the 20-action undo stack, 30 days of version history, the 30-day Bin and the guard that refuses a stale save.