A Notion alternative that lives on your laptop.
Notion is beautiful and it rents you your own company for $10 a seat, forever. The Founder's Engine is one file — buy it once, run the company from it, keep it when you close the laptop.
This isn't a takedown of Notion. Notion earns its money. But small teams and solo founders quietly drown in workspaces they'll never migrate off, and the Engine is for people who'd rather not build a decade of company memory inside a rented database.
What the Engine actually holds
KPIs (revenue, runway, cash-in/out), a light CRM, a decision log, a roadmap, hiring pipeline, docs and SOPs, and a weekly-review view. It's not trying to be a full wiki — it's trying to be the small dashboard a founder actually opens on a Monday morning.
The migration question
You can paste Notion pages in as Markdown; the docs section accepts it. Most people don't migrate everything — they migrate the twenty pages they actually re-read.
The thirty-day out
Every knife carries a thirty-day, one-e-mail refund. Try it for a month.
Common questions
Does the team collaborate in real time?
No live cursors. Small teams either share the file over a shared drive or e-mail deltas. If real-time editing is central to how you work, keep Notion; the Engine is for teams who realise their real-time editing was mostly one person editing at a time.
What about templates?
The Engine ships opinionated — the templates are the tool. You can add more, but the whole point is that opinion is the feature.
Can I use Notion and the Engine together?
Yes. Some founders keep Notion as a public wiki and the Engine as the private dashboard. Works fine.
How does this compare to Obsidian?
See /vs/obsidian. Obsidian is a personal notes app; the Engine is a small-company operating file.