Why we are making Kartoteq.
Because we kept losing decisions in chats. A small team, a long-standing habit of taking notes, and one simple idea: the result of a project should not be the last message in a conversation.
Kartoteq started with a small irritation. One of us was planning a renovation and had the useful part of the project spread across three AI chats, a folder of screenshots and a long thread with a builder. Each chat started from zero. The decisions were somewhere in the middle of the thread. The brief for the architect got written the night before, from memory.
We thought a notebook should be able to hold all of that: the sources, the arguments and the current result for one goal, with the reason next to every decision. That is what we are building, for one person first and then for a team.
Why the name
A card index is an old tool for a simple job: find one card among thousands, and see what it is filed next to. We liked that. Kartoteq keeps the cards, adds the goal they serve and lets AI read them with you. The cards stay yours. What they become is decided by you, not by the model.
Where the idea came from
In 2025 one of us was planning a renovation and running three AI chats at once: one about the layout, one about electrics, one about the budget. Each chat was useful. Together they were a mess. The decision about where the kitchen goes lived in chat two, the reason for it in chat one, and the measurements in a photo on a phone.
We tried the usual answer, a note app. It kept the pieces but not the connections. Nobody wrote down why the kitchen moved, so three weeks later we argued about it again. That argument is the origin of Kartoteq: a notebook where sources, the discussion and the current result sit next to each other, and the reason is kept next to the decision.
What the name means
A card index is the oldest tool for one job: finding one card among thousands and seeing what it points to. Kartoteq keeps that job and adds a second one. The cards do not just sit there; a notebook with a goal turns them into a brief, a plan or a report, and the graph shows how cards from different notebooks relate.
We like that the name sounds a bit old-fashioned. It is a reminder that the hard part was never storage. It was finding the thing and understanding why you kept it.
What we promise and what we do not
We promise that your notes are yours: export to HTML, Markdown, PDF or a full ZIP whenever you like. We promise that AI sees only the notebook you point it at and only the sources you have access to. We promise to show the cost of an AI operation before it runs.
We do not promise dates. The roadmap page says what is done, what is in progress and what comes next, and we update it when things change rather than when it looks good. We do not promise that every file format will be understood by every model, and the pages about AI say so.
For organisations that need it on their own servers
Some teams cannot keep their knowledge with an outside provider: law firms, engineering bureaus, public bodies. For them we deploy the product core in their infrastructure, under their domain and name, and agree deployment, sign-in, integrations, AI configuration and support in one contract. Scope and price are individual. If this is you, write to us and describe the constraint, not the feature list; the constraint tells us more.
Where to go next
RoadmapContact
Start with one notebook.
The Personal plan is free: notes, files and search. AI and shared notebooks can be added later, when a project needs them.
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