Principles

Notes ought to outlive apps

Every note you write in SilverBullet is a plain markdown file sitting in a folder on your disk. Folders and plain text files have been around for many decades and will survive for many more.

No cloud account you can’t cancel. No export feature you have to remember to run before the company gets acquired. If SilverBullet+ disappeared tomorrow, your notes would still be there, readable in any text editor, syncable with any file sync tool, grep‘able from any terminal.

This is the foundation, and a principle well articulated by Steph Ango’s “File over app”.

Applications should grow with you

Most note apps ship with a fixed set of features. You either bend your workflow to match the app, or you abandon it for something closer to what you actually need. SilverBullet takes a different approach: instead of shipping every possible feature, it ships with some strong fundamentals, and then allows you to build the features you want on top, or reuse what other enthusiasts have built already.

While SilverBullet comes with some batteries included, it encourages hacking and making it your own. You want a dashboard of this week’s tasks, grouped by project and sorted by due date? Write a query. You want a custom command that creates a daily note with today’s weather prefilled? Write some Space Lua.

Over time, your space becomes yours and only yours. Shaped to your specific brain, not the least-common denominator.

Open source at heart, commercial to sustain

SilverBullet.md has been in development since 2022, primarily as a passionate project by Zef Hemel. Over time, the product grew in scope and number of users, and became more of a challenge to manage. The purpose of making SilverBullet+ a more commercially-oriented product, separate from the open source self-hosted silverbullet.md, is to make the entire ecosystem financially sustainable. Specifically allowing Zef (and potentially others) to dedicate more time to it.

If you decide to pay for SilverBullet+ (after the beta period ends), you’re not paying for a .zip file, you’re contributing to a sustainable future for the open source project as well.