We started building Bun Agents after a frustrating Tuesday afternoon. We had a task overdue in Todoist, a half-written note trapped in Notion (which was down, again), a habit tracker that hadn't synced since last week, and a journal entry that we couldn't export without upgrading to a tier we didn't need. That Tuesday was the moment the question became unavoidable: why do we tolerate this?

The answer, we discovered, has more to do with inertia and network effects than with product quality. Cloud-first SaaS became the default architecture in the 2010s because bandwidth was getting cheap and "always available from anywhere" sounded better than the alternative. But the tradeoffs were buried in the fine print: your data lives on someone else's server, you pay forever to access your own notes, and when their infrastructure hiccups, your productivity stops.

Bun Agents is our answer to that. It's an offline-first, privacy-respecting productivity suite — a collection of focused tools (tasks, notes, habits, journaling, bookmarks, and more) that share a single local SQLite database in your browser. Your data never leaves your device unless you choose to sync it. There's one flat price that covers everything. And you can export your entire database as a .sqlite file any time you want — because it's your data.

The problem with modern productivity SaaS

To understand why we built what we built, it helps to name the specific failure modes of the current market clearly.

Data lock-in is the business model, not a side effect. Notion, Todoist, Obsidian Sync, Craft, and virtually every other productivity SaaS makes it easy to import your data and deliberately difficult to export it in a portable format. Notion's export is a maze of nested folders with broken links. Todoist exports to a proprietary format that no other tool understands. This is intentional: the harder it is to leave, the more stable their revenue. Your data becomes their moat.

Outages are more common than vendors admit. In September 2024, Notion experienced a multi-hour outage that left users unable to access their wikis, meeting notes, or project boards. Todoist had a similar incident in early 2024 affecting task syncing and reminders across their entire user base. These aren't edge cases — they're what happens when your productivity depends on a third party's uptime. An offline-first app, by definition, cannot go down.

Price creep compounds silently. The average knowledge worker now subscribes to five to seven separate productivity apps. At $8–$16/month each, that's anywhere from $480 to $1,300 per year — just for tools that help you manage your work. And prices only go one direction. When Notion raised its team pricing in 2023, users had a choice between paying more or losing access to months of accumulated notes and documents. That's not a choice; it's coercion.

"Your tools should serve you, not the other way around. The moment you feel trapped by your productivity software, it has failed at its most fundamental job."

Our philosophy: local-first, one price, your data

Bun Agents is built around three principles that we decided were non-negotiable from day one.

Local-first. Everything you create — tasks, notes, habits, journal entries, bookmarks — is stored in a SQLite database that lives in your browser's Origin Private File System (OPFS). This is a sandboxed, persistent storage API available in all modern browsers that gives each web app a private filesystem. Your data is on your device, full stop. The app works identically whether you have a great connection, a slow connection, or no connection at all.

One flat price. We charge $1.99/month. That's it. Every plugin, every feature, every future update is included. We don't have a "basic" tier that locks you out of the useful parts, and we don't have an "enterprise" tier for features that should be standard. One price, everything included, cancel any time. We'd rather have 10,000 users who each pay $1.99 than 1,000 users who pay $16 and resent us for it.

Your data, actually yours. You can export your entire Bun Agents database as a raw .sqlite file from the settings panel at any time. That file is yours. You can open it with DB Browser for SQLite, query it with DuckDB, import it into your own scripts, or just keep it as a backup. We also provide per-plugin JSON exports if you want something more readable. If you cancel your subscription tomorrow, you lose access to sync but you keep every byte of data you ever created.

The plugin architecture: 15+ tools, one database

One of the most important architectural decisions we made was to build Bun Agents as a collection of plugins that share a single database rather than as a monolithic app. Each plugin owns its own database schema, its own tables, and its own queries — but they all read and write to the same local SQLite file. This means a task can link to a journal entry, a habit can trigger a note, and a bookmark can be associated with a project, without requiring any network round-trips or API calls between services.

The current plugin set includes:

Every plugin ships with a browser-installable PWA experience. There's no Electron wrapper, no native app to download, no app store approval process to wait through. You install it like a website and it behaves like a native app, complete with offline support, push notifications (where supported), and a home screen icon.

How we compare to Notion, Todoist, and Things

We get asked about this constantly, so let's be direct. Notion is excellent for teams and wikis. It's collaborative by design, and if you need a shared knowledge base with multiple editors, it's genuinely hard to beat. What it's not is a focused personal productivity app. Its block-based everything paradigm works great for documents but creates friction for quick task capture, habit tracking, or journaling. And critically: it requires internet access, it charges per user, and your data is in their cloud.

Todoist is the best pure task manager on the market. If tasks are all you need, it's very good. But it doesn't do notes, habits, journaling, or bookmarks — so you'll end up with four more apps alongside it, each with its own subscription. And Todoist's data is in their cloud, processed by their servers, and governed by their privacy policy.

Things is a beautiful, polished macOS and iOS app with a loyal following. The UX is outstanding. But it's Apple-only, it doesn't work in the browser, syncing requires iCloud, and there's no web access. It's also a one-time purchase with no recurring feature development, which means the plugin ecosystem is static.

Bun Agents is not trying to be any of these. It's for the person who wants every tool they use daily — tasks, notes, habits, journal, and more — to work together, work offline, and actually belong to them. If that's you, we'd love for you to try it.

What's coming next

We're in active development on several fronts. On-device AI is our biggest near-term focus: we're integrating WebLLM to run small language models (currently Phi-3-mini and Llama-3.2-3B) directly in the browser, so you can get AI-powered summarization, writing assistance, and task suggestions without any of your content leaving your device. We're also working on optional end-to-end encrypted cloud sync for multi-device users — zero-knowledge, meaning our servers never see plaintext.

The roadmap also includes a public plugin API so developers can build and share their own Bun Agents plugins, a desktop wrapper for users who want deeper OS integration, and a collaborative mode for households and small teams who want to share specific data (like a shared task list or a household journal) while keeping personal data private.

We're a small team, we move carefully, and we're playing a long game. The productivity SaaS market is overdue for a reset — apps that actually respect their users, that work when the internet doesn't, and that don't treat your data as their product. Bun Agents is our contribution to that reset. We hope you'll join us.