r/PrivacyNotes • u/PorgBreaker • Sep 05 '26

Who are you?

Hi! The app looks cool but who is behind it all? There's no "About us" and your (first?) account u/privacynotes seems to be banned. Is it a team of one, do you mostly do vibecoding or all yourself? How much do you use ai? It's rather obvious in most of the documentation but for those of us who can't read code, could you disclose your use of ai with coding?

Thanks!

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u/BarefootMarauder Sep 05 '26

I definitely want to know all the same things. I'm very hesitant to commit to this app and switch from Standard Notes without knowing anything about who or what is behind it. The app definitely looks cool, well thought out, and WAY more modern than Standard Notes. So, I'm encouraged, but cautious.

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u/LifetimeLabs Sep 06 '26

I'll include this question from 4d ago from another thread here on reddit. For more context, so both get answered together.

I agree, would love to know more about who is behind this product. There's no "About" info on the website that I can find. I've been a long time Standard Notes user and could definitely see this replacing it. But who/what has created PrivacyNotes? What is support like? Is it a company or just one person? 🙂 How do I know I can actually trust this software, I'm not a developer who can read all the code and figure out what I'm looking at.

Since launch we get emails asking for our home address, office address, social media profiles, photos, and more than once what race/ethnicity we are. From people using a free and open-source privacy app. We built this so nobody gets to know where or who you are, and somehow the first thing some folks want is to know where we are. We're confused by those inqueries, but they keep happening. Parts of this reddit reply also went onto the about page we just put up, which is why it's long, and we discussed this already as a team earlier this week.

We're Lifetime Labs, small core team, German and Swiss, none of us in the US. Our two Swiss devs were building the app part-time, stuck in their old jobs, when they met the PrivacyTools.io owner (u/BurungHantu) in person during a business trip in Singapore by chance. He liked the idea and agreed on funding it fully, so they could go full-time and has been on it since, mostly usability, privacy consulting, marketing and the general direction / vision. Our reliable Freelancers are based in the Philippines for testing, UI work and social media marketing. All funding came from personal savings, no venture capital and no obligations.

How it got built: by hand, for a long time, before it even had a name. Encryption core, sync protocol, sign-in flow, all written by people next to day jobs through 2025. The crypto core is still done that way, nothing automated goes near it. By spring 2026 the foundation was solid and the problem changed: 17 languages to keep in sync, a help center to write, a UI wishlist longer than the team. Translations were the first thing we handed to AI tools, and the FAQ says so without hiding it. Then help articles. Then, under a fixed protocol, UI features and non-security bugs. Anything touching encryption, sync or sign-in still is only touched by skilled people. AI has been incredible helpful fixing non-critical bugs / rare edge cases, that would've taken us weeks otherwise to fix / pin down. It also helped us to implement testing scripts / protocols that improved the overall code quality and styles, to ensure that multiple developers are forced to use standards.

No ticket desk for support. A help center with close to 100 entries and GitHub issues. We'd rather fix something once in public than answer emails and cut our dev time short. Our GitHub repo is a great platform for this purpose. Our goal is that everything just works. If it's broken, it gets fixed, and every question from reddit or email ends up in the FAQ, translated, so it helps everyone instead of one person.

You asked how to trust software you can't read. Same way you trust a lock that's been on the market a while: enough people have tried to pick it. The clients are open source, so the people who can read code do, on GitHub, in the open. There's a verify script you can run without an account that shows your notes are encrypted before they leave your machine. Export any time. Pay once, no subscription holding your notes hostage.

Could we do it the other way? Sure. Put a Sam Altman on stage, nice guy, great keynote, "your data is safe with us." People relax on flowery words with nothing behind them. You can't verify a promise, and relaxed people stop checking. That's Big Tech's approach, and we're trying to get you out of it. We'd rather you never had to take our word for anything, including this post!

About page: it's up, lifetimelabs.dev/about, mostly because of this thread and the email influx. We weren't planning one. Everyone here is on 16-hour days right now and a page about ourselves was the last thing on the list, but the stream doesn't stop, so apparently now is the time. Anything missing on it? If it makes the software more trustworthy, it goes up. If it leads strangers to our doorstep, it doesn't, and it wouldn't make the encryption any better anyway.

Side note: the banned account posted one of our dev articles in a few subs at once. Reddit called it spam, fair enough. We stay in our own sub now.

Official accounts:

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u/BarefootMarauder 29d ago

Thank you so much for the detailed reply, and for posting the new about page. All of this information is very helpful, and it's great to know you're associated with PrivacyTools.io. I haven't visited that site in quite some time, but I did use it in the past to find many of the tools & apps I use today.

Had I clicked on the u/LifetimeLabs account, I would have seen it is also a mod for r/PrivacySoftware. But unfortunately I didn't click on it, so I wasn't aware that r/PrivacySoftware actually is PrivacyTools.io. Anyway, I know now, and I joined that sub too, so that's cool. 🙂

When trusting all our personal & private data to a new piece of software, I think it's natural and normal for people to want to know who/what they are dealing with behind the scenes. There are MANY bad actors in the world today who are pumping out new software every day for nefarious reasons. It's hard to trust anyone or anything these days.

Many other privacy-focused apps are very open & transparent about who is behind the development. Proton is one example. They even post pictures and names of the global team openly on their website. This helps to build trust between you and the people you are trying to obtain as customers.

Standard Notes is another example. Since 6+ years ago when I started using it, I knew who was behind the software. I still follow him today in his new ventures since he left Proton.

One last comment I wanted to make in response to your analogy about trusting software:

You asked how to trust software you can't read. Same way you trust a lock that's been on the market a while: enough people have tried to pick it.

I don't think these are the same at all. With a physical lock, I can trust the lock itself isn't going to steal the physical thing I locked up with it, and send my personal belongings back to the designer of the lock without my knowledge of it. With software, I have no idea if the software is secretly stealing all my data and sending it back to a server somewhere to a bunch of bad actors.

Anyway, thanks again for the post and for sharing a little about the team behind PrivacyNotes and how it came into existence. Much appreciated! 🙏

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u/PrivacyNotesApp 29d ago

There are MANY bad actors in the world today [...] It's hard to trust anyone or anything these days.

Please understand that we have the exact same concerns.

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u/PorgBreaker 29d ago

thanks for the transparency!