Inkwell is a personal OS for makers who juggle a day job, freelance clients, and side projects — without losing the plot. Tasks, time, money, habits, journal, and an AI sidekick that creates projects, logs hours and raises invoices when you ask it to.
One notebook that holds your whole week instead of nine apps that each hold a slice. Inkwell keeps tasks, time, invoices, documents, habits and a journal in one place, so your day job, your clients and your side project stop needing you as the integration layer between them.
The longer version is in why we built Inkwell.
Job, freelance, side projects — Inkwell holds the whole shape of your work. Tasks, time, costs, docs, notes, prompts. No more 9 tabs to remember what you're working on.
Habits, mood, energy, deep-work hours — quietly logged, then surfaced. Patterns you didn't notice become obvious. Tuesdays really do drag.
Every client gets a private portal — milestones, shared docs, invoices, and a chat thread with you. Fewer status-update emails, more trust.
Yes — that's the whole point. Your day job, your freelance gigs and the thing you build at night live side by side in one notebook, each with its own milestones, files and notes. Client projects get a private portal; side projects just leave the client field empty.
Yes. A timer that knows which project it's for keeps running across page loads and devices, so a closed laptop doesn't lose an afternoon. The tracked total sits right there when you write the invoice, and logging expenses against the project turns revenue into real margin.
Mood and energy logged with each journal entry, habits on a 53-week heatmap, and quarterly goals linked to real projects. Yesterday's entry is waiting when you open today's. It's the part of the notebook nobody else sees — and the journal is encrypted a second time before it's stored.
Only what you mark client-visible: milestones, shared documents, invoices, and a message thread with you. Not your internal notes, not your other clients, not your rates. Each portal is password-protected and a portal account can't reach the main app — walk it yourself before you invite anyone.
It does things. Ask it to start a project, add three tasks, log two hours to Tuesday or raise an invoice, and it does — after showing you a confirmation card. It reads your live workspace, so it answers with your real projects and hours, not generic advice. It never touches your journal.
Seeing a week from above. It's a graph of projects, tasks, notes and tags you can drag through and filter by tag, project, person or recency. Overloaded nodes are your bottlenecks. Click any node to jump to the source — including the note from January you'd forgotten.
Everything is encrypted in transit and at rest. Your journal gets a second lock on top — encrypted again at the application layer, with the key held in a separate vault rather than in the database schema. And the sidekick never sees it: journal entries are never sent to the AI.
Journal entries are encrypted again at the application layer before they ever touch a table. The key lives in a separate vault — not in the schema, not in our code, never in your browser. A leaked table dump shows ciphertext, not your words.
Every table carries a Postgres row-level security policy. Even if our application code forgot a WHERE clause, the database would still return nothing that isn't yours.
The AI sidekick sees projects, tasks, and time when you ask it to — never your journal. And nothing you write trains anyone's model.
Start free forever. Upgrade only when you're winning.
The personal notebook is free forever, for one person, with no card. Folio is $12 a month, or $9 a month billed yearly, and adds clients, private portals, invoicing and expenses. Studio is $24, or $19 billed yearly, for up to 5 people in one workspace.
For one person juggling a job, clients and side projects — usually yes, because the gap those tools leave is the seam between them. Notion won't track billable time, Toggl won't hold your projects, and none of them give a client a portal. Inkwell is one tool with no gaps.
| Feature | Inkwell | Notion | Linear | Toggl |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Projects + tasks + sub-tasks | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Time tracking + billing | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Habits + mood + journal | Yes | Partly | No | No |
| Client portals (read-only) | Yes | No | No | No |
| AI project assistant | Yes | Partly | No | No |
| Mind-map / graph view | Yes | No | No | No |
| Invoices + expenses | Yes | No | No | Partly |
| Hand-drawn, calming UI | Yes | No | No | No |
| Built for one person, not 50 | Yes | No | No | No |
✓ yes · ~ partly · — no
Full head-to-heads, including what each of them is genuinely better at — see all comparisons. Or read the arithmetic behind the idea: one notebook, not nine tabs.
I tried Notion, Linear, Toggl, three habit apps. Inkwell replaced all five. My Sunday review now takes 10 minutes instead of 90.
The client portals alone paid for the year. My freelance clients stopped emailing 'just checking in' three times a week.
It looks like nothing else I use. I actually want to open it in the morning. That's not a small thing.
Yes — the whole personal notebook is free forever, for one person, with no card. That's projects, tasks, time, docs, boards, mind-map, journal, habits, goals, calendar, and the AI sidekick. Folio adds the client side: clients, private portals, invoicing, expenses and a chat thread per client. Studio adds up to 5 people in one workspace.
Sketch is free forever. Folio is $12 a month, or $9 a month billed yearly, and adds clients, private portals, invoicing and expenses. Studio is $24 a month, or $19 billed yearly, for up to 5 people. Prices are in USD, and both paid plans start with a 14-day trial.
The free Sketch plan needs no card at all. Paid plans start with a 14-day free trial and do ask for a card up front, but you are not charged during the trial. We email you before it ends; cancel before the last day and no payment is taken.
Ask within 14 days of any first payment on a plan and we refund it in full — no forms and no exit interview. Annual plans cancelled mid-term get a pro-rata refund of unused whole months. If you forget to cancel a trial and get charged, tell us and we refund it.
People whose work doesn't fit in one box: a day job, a few freelance clients, and something being built at night. It suits one person, or a studio of up to five. If your week is mostly one of those things, a specialist tool will probably serve you better.
It's the category name for one tool that holds your whole working life rather than a slice of it. In Inkwell that means tasks, time, invoices, documents, clients, habits and a journal in one notebook, so your job, your clients and your side projects share a single week rather than three apps.
For one person, usually. Notion holds notes and databases well, but it won't track billable time, raise an invoice, or give a client a private portal — so most people end up bolting a timer and a spreadsheet onto it. Inkwell is one tool that already covers all three.
Built for one — that's the point. The Studio plan adds up to 5 collaborators for small studios, but it's never going to be a 50-seat product. There are plenty of those.
Yes, on the Folio and Studio plans. Track time against a project, open Finance → Invoices, and the tracked total is right there to copy into the invoice. Send it and it appears in that client's portal. Expenses log against the project too, so you see margin rather than just revenue.
Yes — it runs real actions, not suggestions. Ask it to set up a project, add tasks, break it into milestones, add a client, raise an invoice, log an expense, or start and stop the timer, and it does. Every change is shown as a confirmation card first, and nothing happens until you approve it.
It's built in — no setup, no API key to manage. It reads your live workspace, so it answers with your real projects and hours rather than generic advice. It only runs when you ask it to, your content is never used to train anyone's model, and Free includes 30 assists a month (unlimited on paid plans).
Yes — everything travels over TLS and sits on AES-256-encrypted storage, and Postgres row-level security keeps each workspace's rows sealed off from every other. Your journal gets a second lock: entries are encrypted again at the application layer before they're stored, with the key held in a separate vault rather than in the database schema. And journal entries are never sent to the AI sidekick.
Not yet — we'd rather not ship an importer that quietly mangles your data. You can drag in .docx and .xlsx files and read them inside Inkwell today, and importing from other tools is on the roadmap.
You always own it, and we never lock you in. Ask us any time for a full Markdown + JSON export including attachments; one-click self-serve export is on the roadmap.
Not a separate app — the web app is responsive and works on a phone for capturing a thought or checking today. A dedicated mobile app isn't something we've committed to.
Because the tools we used before felt like dashboards. Dashboards make you anxious. Notebooks invite you in. We chose calm over slick.