Two people. One app. Six years.
Fjordnote OÜ is a studio of two in Tallinn. One product since 2020, no outside money, no hires. That is not modesty. It is the constraint that decides what the app becomes.
How it started
In 2019 the two founders maintained a research archive of about eleven thousand documents for a university department. The mandated tool kept everything in a database they could not open, synced on a schedule they could not see, and took nine seconds to return a search result. When the department license lapsed, exporting the archive ran four days and produced HTML nobody could read.
They spent that winter writing a replacement that kept every note as a file on disk. It was meant to last one term. The first public build shipped in March 2020 because two colleagues asked for a copy, and the mailing list then grew faster than the department did.
The shape of the app has barely moved since. Fjordnote 3.4 looks close to 2.0 because the shape was right, and because churn is expensive for the people who open it every morning.
How the studio works
Releases land about every six weeks. Nothing ships on a pre-announced date, because a date drags half-finished work into a build. The changelog gets written first. The release cuts when the changelog is honest.
Both founders answer support mail and both wrote the code, so a bug report reaches someone who can open the relevant file. Median reply time last year was nine hours. Holding it there beats growing a ticket system.
- Funded entirely by sync subscriptions
- No investors, no board, no growth target
- No existing plan has ever been repriced
- Every file format ever shipped still opens
The studio
| Founded | November 2019 |
|---|---|
| First public build | March 2020 |
| Current version | 3.4 |
| Paying accounts | 7,900 |
| People on staff | 2 |
| Outside investors | None |
Figures reviewed 30 January 2026.
The studio is not hiring.
That is no policy against people. There is simply no work here that splits three ways without adding coordination the app would pay for.
Who you are writing to
No support team sits behind the address. It is these two, in one room, most weekdays.
Kaarel Vaher
Editor, sync, and anything that must not lose data
Wrote the first build over a winter break and has owned the file layer since. Spends most of a release cycle on the boring half: crash-safe writes, conflict handling, and making sure a note saved during a power cut is still a note.
Liis Rebane
Interface, search, docs, and the bulk of the mail
Joined three months in and redrew the whole window. Owns the search index and the keyboard model, writes the changelogs, and answers rather more than half of what arrives in the inbox.
Decisions that are already settled
These are settled, not pending. Knowing them up front should save an evaluation.
Not raising money
An investor needs an exit. For a note-taking app that means a much larger product or a sale to a company with different priorities. Either one breaks the promises on the rest of this site.
Not selling anything but the app
No advertising, no data partnerships, no bundled offers in the settings pane. The subscription is the entire business model, which keeps it very easy to explain.
Not chasing every request
Roughly a third of what people ask for ships. The rest gets declined in a real reply instead of parked on a public roadmap that never moves.
Where the studio is
Two desks in a converted factory building in Telliskivi, ten minutes north of Tallinn's old town. No reception and no showroom. Visitors already in the city who want to talk about the file format over coffee usually get a yes.
Post reaches the registered address below. Anything urgent should go by email, since the letterbox is checked about once a week.
Registered details
Fjordnote OÜ
Telliskivi 60a/3
10412 Tallinn, Estonia
Registrikood 14682093
VAT EE102184563
[email protected]