If your question isn't here, write to me at mattbrockwell@gmail.com. I'd rather answer directly and then add it.
What is Pharion?
Pharion is an outliner and a knowledge graph. Blocks nest, pages link with [[double brackets]], every day gets a page. If you've used Roam, Logseq, or Tana, I predict you'll be at home in thirty seconds.
What I've tried to design is a place where thinking starts, rather than just where thinking is stored. You can send a block to someone and hold a conversation around it — and every word you write in that conversation is a real block in your own notes, yours to keep and link, while everything they write stays in theirs. The thread belongs to both of you. Each of you keeps your own half. You can start a conversation or be invited into one, and the thread stays attached to a block that you can bookmark, link to, and either keep or discard.
Your notes can also publish. With a cloud account you can turn an essay into a formatted page with a shareable URL, directly from the notes it grew out of. That fulfils something I've always wanted from a note-taking app — that the finished, outward-facing work can live right there among the notes that produced it.
How is Pharion different from Roam Research?
In a nutshell, I built Pharion after using Roam for about five years, and realizing I wanted a few things to be different. In order of importance to me, the things I wanted to add were a better calendar system with built in support for weekly and monthly views, a namespacing system that allowed for pages to be nested children of other pages, and "sequences" of notes that are constructed using individual "handles".
The other big architectural difference came out of helping run a series of book clubs in Roam. That experience convinced me that having pathways for sharing and publishing directly from your notes matters enormously — but that the wrong way to build them is giving a large group simultaneous edit access to a large single shared collection of notes. That large collection can quickly become a problem too complex to tame. Wikipedia works well, in part because the ratio of editors to writers to readers is a pyramid. But daily knowledge work means that everyone is a writer. What works for one person rarely works perfectly for another, and the pyramid is upside down.
Nonetheless, in those book clubs, we got a sufficient glimpse of the possibilities of shared note-taking and sense-making to know that the process could be both individually empowering and collectively revolutionary. So I refocused my energies, deciding that the answer would be to build multiple connection pathways for sharing notes, on top of a well-designed individual foundation.
Each person's note collection needs to have clear boundaries — it is from within a well-boundaried collection of notes that sharing becomes possible.
Two ways to run it
(1) On your machine. (coming soon) A desktop app that runs entirely locally — your own database, on your own disk. No account, no server, nothing leaves the machine. Free forever. The complete outliner: blocks, pages, namespaces, daily pages, linked references, spaced repetition, all of it.
(2) In the cloud. The same tool, hosted, plus everything that needs other people: shared blocks, conversations, correspondence, publishing.
You move work between them by exporting and importing a file — deliberately, when you decide to. There's no background sync. I've designed it so that the boundary between your machine and a server is one you cross on purpose.
Who's building it?
One person. I'm Matt — a psychiatrist by training, and someone who has been looking for a note system that actually holds together since before I was a pre-med student.
This isn't a company yet. It's two years of solo work, and although it's built to last, you're trusting a person rather than an organisation. That person is me. I value that trust, and will continue to honor it by being as responsive and clear about my decisions as I can be.
What does it cost?
The planned desktop app will be free, forever, with no time limit or trial period. My goal is to give any individual who wants it a free, no-strings-attached way to keep a collection of linked notes, at no charge — forever. A notes collection should be able to travel with you, as long as you need it. A note-taking discipline, once you adopt it, can be a lifelong project, and Pharion is designed with that in mind. My dad kept handwritten notebooks right up until the last week of his life, and I believe that you should be able to go on writing your notes into Pharion for as long as you care to — whether months, years, or decades — and that you should be able to do so without paying anyone. That's why the desktop app will be free, forever — it is my invitation to you to consider note-making to be a lifelong habit, in the same way that playing a musical instrument can be a lifelong habit.
The cloud version is currently free and invitation-only while Pharion is in alpha. Eventually it will carry a subscription: $100 a year, billed annually. This subscription will allow use of social features, sync across devices, messaging, membership in channels and communities, and publication to the web. Anyone for whom that's a real obstacle will have the option to pay a reduced $50 a year by asking — no form, no verification, purely on the honour system. Alpha users will get their first year free, and thereafter the founding member's rate: $80 a year, for life.
You're paying for the network, for the hosting, and for someone still being here working on it. Your data is not for sale, there are no ads, and there are no engagement metrics or follower counts anywhere in the product. You're using the note-taking app I use myself. I don't want those things, so you'll never be bothered by them either.
Who can see my notes?
Run the app locally and the answer is nobody but you — your notes are as secure as the computer they sit on.
In the cloud: only you, by default. Nothing is public unless you deliberately make it so. I run the servers, so I have theoretical database access, as with every hosted tool you've ever used. But the application gives me no way to read a user's lighthouse, and I will never read your notes unless you ask me to. While Pharion is in alpha, it would be wise to keep passwords, financial details, and clinical records out of the cloud version.
Publishing, when you do it, means a public page at your own address — pharion.app/@you/writing/your-essay — and, if you've turned your public profile on, a listing on your Writing page. Nothing about an essay is visible before you publish it, the address goes dark the moment you unpublish, and drafts can be kept invisible until the moment you feel ready to publish them. You'll also be able to publish from Pharion anonymously, under a pseudonym, or behind a password for sharing with specific audiences.
Encryption options are on the roadmap and not yet built.
How secure are my notes?
The strongest answer Pharion offers is the local app: no server, no network, nothing to intercept.
In the cloud, today: HTTPS only, with plain HTTP redirected. Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes — plaintext is never stored or seen. Every query is scoped to your lighthouse, and edits are checked against a block's author.
Coming, and not yet built: end-to-end encryption, database-enforced row-level security, a full access audit trail, two-factor authentication.
AI and your notes
Your notes will never be used to train a model. Not mine, not anyone's, not anonymised, not in aggregate, never.
Inside the product, the principle is that what you write should be unambiguously yours. An assistant you connect may be able to read what you point it at and reason about what it reads. It gets no general write path into your lighthouse, and nothing it produces becomes a block unless you deliberately put it there. The last inch of authorship should always be human.
Getting your notes out
Settings → Export, three ways.
Package (.zip) — the complete backup: the graph plus every image, in one file. This is the one to keep.
Pharion JSON — the graph itself, one click: hierarchy, tags, and links intact. It round-trips, so it's also your restore file and the way you move between desktop and cloud. It carries no image files — the package does that.
Markdown outline — plain bulleted text, indented two spaces per level, that opens in any editor. Your [[links]] survive as written. Lossier by design; this is the copy that will still be readable in forty years with no software at all.
Export will never be a paid feature, and the file goes directly to your machine.
Bringing notes in
You can import a Pharion JSON file — or a package — into your own lighthouse. That's how restores and desktop-to-cloud moves work. It also lets you share whole note collections with other users, and naming collisions are handled cleanly: the imported collection lands under a namespace of your choosing, links rewritten to match.
Importers for Roam, Logseq, and Obsidian are planned and not yet built — though if you paste an outline from Roam today, Pharion already recognises the shape and turns it into blocks.
If Pharion goes away
This is a solo operation, so you may be wondering what happens if I walk away or can't continue.
Part of the answer already exists: the desktop app will run on your machine without me. It won't phone home, it won't stop working, and it will be yours permanently. And if I ever have to leave this project, I'll publish the source code publicly, under a licence that lets anyone run it and carry it on.
For the cloud — if Pharion ever shuts down, members will get no less than 90 days' notice, export will stay available for the whole period, and the export format will be documented publicly so that anyone can write an importer for it, including after I'm gone.
Unlike the Hotel California, you can check out any time and you can leave, taking your notes with you. I'd love to hear your reasons if it comes to that, but I'll respect the choice and help you carry it out.
What's it built with?
The why explains the choices. Pharion is built with groups of people in mind — sharing blocks, holding a live conversation, annotating a book together. That's why it's written in Elixir and Phoenix: on the Erlang virtual machine, already optimized to make shared, real-time work straightforward. As for the database, a graph of nested blocks is underneath a recursive-query problem, and PostgreSQL has been exceptionally good at those for decades.
The list: Elixir and Phoenix LiveView, PostgreSQL in the cloud and SQLite on the desktop, CodeMirror 6 for the editor, hosted on Fly.io. As far as I know it's the only bidirectional-linking knowledge tool built this way. It's worked well, and I have no plans to change any of it.
Offline and mobile
Offline: yes — the desktop app will work with no connection at all, permanently and for free. The hosted version needs a connection, as hosted things do.
Mobile: Pharion runs in a phone browser, and capture works well — the capture page installs to your home screen like an app, and on Android you can share straight into it from anywhere. Serious outlining on a small screen isn't a good experience yet — and a proper mobile design is planned.
Something missing, or something here that doesn't match what you've found? Write to me at mattbrockwell@gmail.com — I'll do my best to answer anything this page doesn't cover.