Working prototype · private beta coming

A knowledge graph that lives on your own machine.

Vellum puts a Tana-style outliner and a Bear-style prose editor on one canvas. The whole graph is a single file on your machine, with no account and nothing in the cloud.

Keep me posted

A look inside

The Vellum workspace with a launcher rail, a notes list, the page being edited, and a side panel of cards.

The whole workspace What it looks like with all the chrome: a launchpad for the places we visit the most, the notes we're flipping through, the page itself, and a side panel for whatever we want to keep an eye on. You can tuck any of it away when you want the quiet.

A long-form essay in Vellum, set in serif type with headings and a pull quote, on the same canvas as the outline.

Writing lives here too Sadly, not too many apps support extensive outlining and free-flowing markdown prose with paragraphs, quotes, and headings. We set out to make vellum the exception.

A library table of books with cover thumbnails and columns for author, status, and rating, grouped by reading status.

Notes that can hold more Tell Vellum a note is a book, or a person, or a project, or any other note type you want, and it picks up a few fields to match. This makes for lovely filtering, grouping, and data display for each note structure.

An AI conversation rendered as a document in the graph, with the question and the response laid out in full.

Conversations that stay Rather than a separate app or bolt-on, we wanted AI threads to be completely integrated and discoverable in vellum. Each chat session sits alongside the ideas it grew out of. All of it unified into the graph.

What it is

A quiet, opinionated place to think.

Local-first and private

The graph is a SQLite file on your own disk. No account required, and nothing leaves your machine.

Single-player by design

Built for one person thinking clearly, not a team workspace. No collaborators, no notifications, no noise.

Prose as a first-class citizen

Most outliners treat long-form writing as an afterthought. Vellum gives prose the same weight as the outline, on the same canvas.

Typed data you can query

Tags give nodes real field schemas, so your notes become data, not just text: query and filter across the whole graph, spin up a view for any kind of thing, and keep elaborating as your thinking grows.

AI that lives in the graph

No need for copy-pasting AI threads into your notes. With Vellum's integrated AI, every turn of the conversation is a node ... linked, searchable, and ready to build on.

Everything connects

Mention any node from anywhere and the link works both ways, automatically. Backlinks and references turn a pile of separate notes into a graph you can actually traverse.

Why we made it

Built by a small team, for our own daily use.

Vellum grew out of a simple wish: a single-player, private place to think, where a powerful outliner and a real prose editor finally live on the same canvas, and where code and typed fields feel right at home. We wanted it for ourselves first.

Vellum is an homage to the tools that blazed this trail, like Roam, Obsidian, iA Writer, Bear, and Tana. We've been using vellum as a daily driver for months, holding a few thousand notes without a hiccup. We're building it slowly, by hand, and with a lot of love.

If you'd like to join us on this journey, we'd love to have you.

Get on the list.

Vellum is a working prototype we use every day. There's no public download yet, but a private beta is coming. Leave your email and we'll tell you the moment you can try it. And we'll send you an invite to our small, invite-only Discord where a few kindred note-takers help shape what's next.