Private betaNotes Tasks Calendar Agents One Markdown vault
Type it, say it, draw it. Plankast turns it into notes, tasks, projects and time — Markdown underneath, every device on top, and open to your own AI agents.
.md files
Export the whole vault any time
iOS · iPadOS · Android · macOS · Windows · Linux · Web
On-device transcript, as you speak.
Lands in your Inbox. Filing, linking and tagging can wait — or be proposed. ⌘K from anywhere.
Plankast is a notes, tasks, calendar and contacts app for people who run several roles at once. Every note — typed, handwritten, recorded or drawn on an infinite canvas — and every task lives in one Areas → Projects tree, is stored as a Markdown file you can open in Obsidian, and can be read and written by your own AI agents over MCP. The people you meet arrive from the same accounts, one page each. It works offline on every platform and never needs an AI key to function.
Why one app
Most people who work this way juggle a handwriting app, a recorder, a whiteboard, a task manager, a calendar, a contacts app and a Markdown editor — and copy things between them. Whichever one you picked in each category, it got something right. Plankast keeps those seven interactions and makes them one substrate: same list, same links, same search, same file.
| What you use today | What that category got right | How it shows up in Plankast |
|---|---|---|
| HandwritingNotability · GoodNotes · Noteshelf | Fluid, pressure-sensitive ink; multi-page notes | Handwritten pages live in the same Notes list as everything else and are found by their recognised text. |
| WhiteboardFigJam · Miro · Lucidchart | An infinite canvas for stickies, shapes and connectors | Boards sit in the same Notes list, fold into an outline your agents can read, and turn their stickies into real tasks. |
| Meeting capturePlaud · Otter · Granola | One-tap recording; transcript, summary, action items | Recorded notes with a synced transcript, a summary block and proposed tasks you accept — in the same note you can type in. |
| TasksTodoist · Things · TickTick | Fast natural-language entry; projects, labels, priorities, filters | Tasks and projects with P1–P4, planned date vs deadline, @next / @waiting / @agenda, and saved filters that also list notes. |
| CalendarFantastical · Notion Calendar · Amie | One agenda across every calendar account | Today and Calendar merge Google and Microsoft 365 with your tasks; drag a task onto the timeline to time-block it. |
| ContactsCardhop · Contacts+ · Covve | One address book, searchable, with everything you know about someone | Your Google and Microsoft contacts merged with everyone you share a calendar with — one page per person, showing every meeting, note and open task with them. |
| Markdown vaultObsidian · Logseq · Joplin | Markdown files; [[wiki links]] and backlinks; local-first | Everything is a Markdown document with links, backlinks, tags, history and a real vault you can export — or keep opening in Obsidian. |
Built around moments
Plankast is designed from the moments in a day, not from a feature list. Each one has to work with no connection and with no AI configured — and get better, never louder, when you add either.
Anywhere · under two seconds
Type, record or draw from any screen. As you type, a live parse preview shows what you will get — a task with a date, an event, a note — and you can save without filing it anywhere. Inbox first; projects, tags and links are optional and can be proposed for you.
Walking into a meeting
The recording attaches to the event happening now and the note appears in your list immediately, with the on-device transcript. When your transcription and chat providers are connected, you get a summary, the decisions, and proposed actions — each with the quote it came from. Accept, edit or dismiss. Nothing becomes a commitment by itself.
Release is green for Friday. Sam flagged the docs site is a day behind — we agreed to cut the migration guide from v1 and ship it the following week.
Thinking through a problem
Handwrite on full-bleed pages with pressure and tilt, palm rejection and tool switching that never leaves the page. Recognised text folds into the note as a section, so search and your agents see one document. Lasso a region to turn it into typed text or a task.
Option A vs B — cost curve flattens after month 18. Exit clause at 18 mo if migration help is in scope.
Recognised ＋ Make a task from selectionWorking something out
A board is an infinite canvas: sticky notes, shapes, connectors that stay attached when you move things, frames, freehand. Single-player by design — no cursors, no votes, no timers. What you put on it folds into the note as an outline, so search, your daily brief and your agents read the board as text. Select a cluster and make tasks of it: each sticky becomes the task it made, and shows its real state.
Problems
— Signup drops at step 3
— Welcome mail unread
— SSO asks in support
The people in it
Your Google and Microsoft contacts, and everyone you have ever shared an invitation with, resolve to one person — the same human, however many lists they appear in and whichever address they used. Their page holds how to reach them, every meeting you have had and the next one, the notes that mention them, and what is open between you. Nothing counts the days since you last spoke.
Starting the day
Today shows your agenda across every connected calendar, the Focus list — overdue, today, P1 and P2, minus anything you are waiting on — and what changed since yesterday, including what your agents did overnight. Drag a task onto the timeline to time-block it. No streaks, no badges, no urgency theatre.
@next & !@waiting & area:work.Switching roles
Areas of life — Personal, your company, your client — are the only partition, and always visible. Every note and task belongs to one. Projects nest inside them and hold tasks and notes together, so opening a project shows the work and the thinking side by side. Move things across when you choose; an agent token can be confined to one area and never sees the rest.
Your data
Every note, task and project is a plain Markdown file with YAML frontmatter, laid out the way you think — area, then project, then the page. Open the vault in Obsidian, mirror it to git, or download the whole thing as a zip. There is nothing to export because it was never locked in.
# vault.zip work/ q4-launch/ kickoff-with-vendor.md ← typed + 2 pages + recording ship-release.md ← task · P1 · planned Fri standup-notes.md onboarding-rework.md ← board · outline folded in inbox/ untitled-recording.md personal/ call-bank.md --- kind: task priority: 1 planned: 2026-09-19 area: work project: q4-launch tags: [next] context_for: [[Kickoff with vendor]] ---
[[Wiki links]], #tags and frontmatter parse back to exactly what you wrote. Backlinks and history on every document.
A local database on every device. Sync state is ambient, never modal. Concurrent edits merge; when they can't, both copies are kept and a conflict copy is filed in Inbox.
Point the vault at a repository and it commits daily, so Obsidian, git history and Plankast all see the same files.
Import a Todoist account (projects, labels, priorities, dates) or an Obsidian vault (folders become projects, links resolve by title).
Sign in with a passkey on the web. Sessions for people, scoped tokens for agents — never the same credential.
No workspaces, no memberships, no switcher. Areas of life are the only partition, so what you see is always exactly yours.
Bring your own model
Plankast has no AI subscription and no server-side keys. Connect the providers you already pay for — or run local models — per purpose. Every AI surface has a complete state without one, and shows what your own keys spent.
Meeting summaries, decisions, proposed actions, and three sentences on top of your daily brief. Without it: the brief is still assembled, without narrative.
Recognises your ink pages into searchable text, and turns a hand-drawn diagram into a clean board you can edit. Without it: pages and boards still sync, render and export.
Full-text search fused with semantic neighbours. Without it: full-text search, always on — and the UI tells you which you're getting.
Speaker-labelled, timestamped transcripts. Without it: the on-device transcript captured while you recorded.
Agents are users too
Plankast does not host an assistant; it exposes itself to yours. Any MCP host — Claude, Claude Code, your own scripts — connects with OAuth 2.1 or a scoped token, sees only the areas of life you allow, and gets the same notes, tasks, calendar and daily brief you do.
$ claude mcp add --transport http plankast https://api.plankast.com/mcp
Give the host the URL and nothing else. It discovers the authorisation server, registers itself, and sends you to a consent page where you sign in and pick the areas it may see.
Tools an agent gets
Boards need no special tool to read: their outline is in the note, so get_document already sees them. draw_board is how an agent makes one.
Every agent write is attributed by name. Anything an agent infers — a task from a transcript, a link it thinks you meant — arrives as a proposal in your Inbox, never as a committed item.
Questions
Plankast is in private beta. Request an invite with your email and we send invites out in batches as seats open — one email when yours is ready, nothing else. If you already have an account, sign in.
No. Every feature works without a model. Connect your own provider keys — Anthropic, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Voyage, or local models through Ollama and LM Studio — to add summaries, handwriting recognition, semantic search and cloud transcription. Nothing works worse without AI; it just works with less magic.
Yes. A board is an infinite canvas with sticky notes, shapes, connectors, frames and freehand — single-player by design, so there are no cursors, votes or timers. What you put on it folds into the note as an outline, so search and your agents read the board as text, and a cluster of stickies becomes real tasks in one move. Export as PNG, PDF, SVG or Mermaid; paste Mermaid back in and it lands as elements you can move.
For the part you actually use. Plankast reads the contacts on the Google and Microsoft accounts you have already connected, and merges them with everyone you share a calendar with — so one person is one page, however many lists they turn up in, and that page carries every meeting, note and open task with them. Two limits worth saying plainly: it does not read the address book on your phone, and it only ever reads. Your contacts elsewhere are never written to or changed. You can export the whole directory as a vCard file any time.
Yes. Every note, task and project is a Markdown file with YAML frontmatter, laid out as area/project/slug.md. [[Wiki links]] and #tags round-trip losslessly, so the vault opens in Obsidian as it is. A board is a rendered .svg beside its note and an outline inside it; images are ordinary files in a folder next to the page. You can also mirror it to a git repository daily and download it as a zip any time.
Over MCP (Streamable HTTP) at /mcp. Hosts that speak MCP authorisation — Claude, Claude Code and others — need only the URL: they discover the authorisation server, register themselves, and send you to a consent page where you choose which areas of life they may see. Scripts and older clients use a scoped token from Settings › Agents & tokens. Tokens can never change your settings.
Yes. Every screen reads and writes a local database first; local actions never show a spinner. Sync runs in the background, merges concurrent edits when it can, and when it cannot it keeps both copies and files a conflict copy in your Inbox with Compare, Keep mine and Keep server. Nothing is lost.
Google Calendar and Microsoft 365. Plankast connects to them, caches events, writes changes back to the provider first, and lets you attach notes and recordings to events or time-block a task onto your calendar. It never owns your calendar.
iOS, iPadOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux and the web, from one codebase. Layouts adapt by width and input — touch, stylus, pointer, keyboard — rather than by operating system.
Yes. The Todoist importer brings projects, labels, priorities and dates into an area of your choice. The vault importer brings an existing Markdown folder in the same way: root files land in the area's inbox, folders become nested projects, and links resolve by title.
No. Plankast is built around one person's workflows: one account, partitioned only by areas of life. If sharing ever comes it will be per area, later.
Keys are encrypted at rest and never shown again after you save them; Plankast holds no AI keys of its own. Your documents live in your account and in the vault export you can take at any time. Every call made with your keys is logged so you can see what they spent.
Private betaRequest an invite
Plankast is in private beta. Leave your email and we will send your invite when a seat opens. Everything else — projects, tags, calendars, agents, models — can come after.
You're on the list.
Invites go out in batches as seats open. We will email when yours is ready — nothing before that.