5/26/2026

Why I'm Building Afterglow

I lost a blog post once. It was a draft about smartphone cameras — how computational photography was catching up with the physical limits of tiny sensors, how software was doing what hardware couldn’t. I had written it in Notion over a few evenings, and one morning it was gone. Not in the trash. Not recoverable through support. Just gone.

After that, I stopped putting anything important in Notion.

The Notion chapter

I started with Notion as a student. Free plan, generous feature set, genuinely good product. I used it for quick ideas, meeting notes, and the occasional longer piece of writing. For a while, it was great. Real-time sync across devices felt almost magical.

Then two things happened. First, Notion added AI features and started charging extra for them. I was a student on a free plan — the upsell felt like the app was being rearranged around revenue instead of around my thinking. Second, my data vanished. One draft, no explanation, no recovery. That was enough.

The deeper lesson was simpler: nobody was responsible for my data. I had trusted a service with my ideas, and when something went wrong, there was no accountability. The sync was real-time and beautiful, but the trust was fragile.

The Obsidian detour

I found Obsidian next, and in many ways it was the opposite of Notion. My notes lived on my own disk. Plain Markdown files I could open in any editor. No subscription required for the core product. The philosophy felt right.

But using Obsidian every day was a different story.

Sync didn’t work out of the box. To sync across devices, I needed either a third-party plugin and my own server, or Obsidian’s paid sync plan. iCloud sync was unreliable, and I used both macOS and Windows — which made every workaround feel fragile. Paying for sync felt like a contradiction: I chose Obsidian because my notes were mine, but syncing them still meant storing them on someone else’s disk.

I tried the alternatives. Dynalist, Logseq, Roam. None of them stuck. Obsidian was still the best option, so I went back and started filling the gaps with community plugins.

That was its own kind of problem. Every time I opened Obsidian, there were toast notifications. Update available. Error in plugin. Something needs to be configured in settings before it will work. I came to write a note, but instead I was maintaining an app.

And now even community plugins are introducing premium tiers.

Every day I opened Obsidian and felt the same quiet frustration: is this really the best we can do?

What I actually wanted

The thing I wanted was simple, and none of the tools gave it to me:

Open the app. Write the thought. Close the app.

When an idea surfaces, the tool should get out of the way. No plugin update banners. No sync conflict modals. No configuration ritual before the basic workflow works. The act of capturing a thought should feel like a continuation — not an interruption.

I wanted a workspace that was beautiful by default, not beautiful after a weekend of customization. I wanted sync that worked without making sync the product. I wanted my notes on my device, encrypted, without needing to think about encryption. And I wanted all of this in one tool that didn’t ask me to assemble it from parts.

So I started building

Afterglow is the tool I wanted to exist.

It’s a personal knowledge workbench — a place to capture ideas, connect thinking, and build a library that grows more useful over time. Not a team tool. Not a plugin platform. Not another app that makes you manage the app before you can use the app.

The name came from the feeling I wanted: a warm glow that doesn’t go out. Dawn light for the night owl. A quiet space where thinking can continue from evening to morning without interruption. Something beautiful that lingers.

The product direction is intentionally narrow:

What comes next

Afterglow is approaching a private beta. The first invitations will go to people who feel the same friction — researchers, writers, builders, students, and anyone whose thinking deserves a better home than a plugin-managed Markdown folder.

If that sounds like you, join the waitlist. I’d like to build this with people who understand the problem, because they’ve lived it too.