Three things happened in that order:

1. The page took four seconds to load.

2. A cookie banner asked me to consent to 412 advertising partners.

3. A modal appeared offering to "save my notes to the cloud" if I signed up.

I closed the tab. I tried the second result. It had ads inside the textarea. The third result was a Google Doc redirect that wanted me to log in. The fourth quietly POSTed every keystroke to a server I'd never heard of.

I just wanted Notepad. The thing that ships with Windows. The thing that has been a single text field with a File menu since 1985. How did the web make this worse?

So I built OnlineNotepad.app. And I want to tell you why, because I think the why matters more than the thing itself.

The problem with "online" anything in 2026

Most online notepads have the same business model: get you to sign up, harvest your text, and either show you ads or sell the data. The "free" notepad is rarely free in the way Notepad.exe is free. You are paying with attention, with email addresses, sometimes with the content of your notes.

This isn't a conspiracy theory. Open the network tab on any of the popular notepad sites and watch what happens when you type. A surprising number of them POST your draft to a server every few seconds — even if you never clicked "save," even if you never made an account. Your forgotten password reset links, your half-written resignation letters, your shopping lists with home addresses on them. All sitting in someone else's database with a retention policy you'll never read.

I'm not even mad about it. I get the economics. Servers cost money, developers cost money, and most users will not pay for a notepad. But I don't have to use those notepads. And neither do you.

What I actually wanted

My requirements were embarrassingly small:

• Loads in under half a second.

• Cursor is in the textarea before I can type.

• Multiple tabs, like the desktop Notepad finally got in Windows 11.

• Dark mode, because I work at night and white screens are violence.

• Markdown preview, because half of what I write is markdown anyway.

• Works offline, because Wi-Fi on trains is a lie.

• Does not phone home. Ever.

That's it. No collaboration. No real-time sync. No AI assistant. No "workspaces." No teams. I have Notion for that. I have Google Docs for that. I have, in some genuinely cursed cases, Confluence for that. I do not need another one.

I just needed a notepad.

The local-first part

The whole architecture of the site fits in one sentence: your notes are stored in your browser's localStorage, and nothing is ever sent anywhere.

This sounds modest but it has weirdly strong consequences:

I can't lose your data, because I never have it. There is no database of user notes. There is no backup tape I could accidentally leak. When journalists eventually publish the inevitable "online notepad company breached, 4 million notes exposed" story, I will not be in it, because there is nothing to breach.

The site works offline. A service worker caches the whole app on your first visit. After that, you can use it on a plane, in a Faraday cage, at your in-laws' house. The server going down does not affect you. The server not existing anymore would not affect you for a while.

Share links don't touch my server either. When you click "Share link," the note gets encoded into the URL after the # fragment. Browsers, by web standard, do not transmit the fragment to the server. The recipient's browser decodes it locally. I cannot log shared notes even if I wanted to, because the data structurally never reaches me.

This is what people mean when they say "local-first." It's not a hosting choice. It's a power dynamic. The default in most web apps is that the company has your data and you have to ask nicely to get it out. Local-first inverts that: you have your data, and the company has to ask nicely to see any of it.

The one feature I didn't expect to care about

I added password-protected notes late, almost as an afterthought, and it ended up being the part I'm proudest of.

Here's the thing about "locked" notes in most apps: the lock is a UI gate. The note is still sitting in plain text in a database somewhere; the app just decides whether to show it to you. That's not security, that's a curtain.

In OnlineNotepad.app, locking a note encrypts it with AES-256, using a key derived from a password you choose. The password is never stored — not on your device, not on a server, nowhere. The encrypted blob is the only thing in localStorage. If you forget the password, the note is genuinely unrecoverable, and I want it that way, because the alternative is a backdoor. It's real encryption you can verify, not a curtain.

The honest trade-off: I cannot do a "forgot password" email, because I have no email and no copy of your note. That's not a missing feature. That's the feature.

What it looks like

Imagine Notepad.exe and a modern browser had a baby. That's basically it. Tabs across the top. A File menu with Save, Open, Print, Share, Lock, Backup. An Edit menu with Find and Replace. A View menu with Dark Mode, Line Numbers, and Markdown Preview. Status bar at the bottom showing line, column, word count. Keyboard shortcuts that work like you expect: Ctrl+T for new tab, Ctrl+S to download, Ctrl+F to find, Ctrl+D for dark mode.

If you've used Notepad once in the last thirty years, you already know how to use it. There is no onboarding, no tour, no tooltip the first time you click something. The cursor is just there, and you type.

The boring confession

I'm posting this on Hashnode partly to share the idea, and partly — let me be honest — because backlinks help small sites get discovered. If you found this useful, that's great. If you also click the link and Google's crawler eventually notices that a developer blog vouched for it, that's even better. I'd rather tell you the truth about that than pretend I wrote 1,000 words out of pure benevolence.

But the site really is free, and there really are no ads, and your notes really do not leave your browser. You can verify all of that in DevTools in about thirty seconds. Open the Network tab, reload the page, type a paragraph, and watch how many requests go out. The answer is zero.

That's the part I'm proud of. Not that I built another notepad — the world has plenty. But that I built one where the most interesting thing about it is what it doesn't do.

Try it: onlinenotepad.app

And if you've ever closed a tab because of a cookie banner, I built it for you.