Savepad has opinions.
TLDR
- It’s YOUR swipe file. Your precious. There are no team plans, because your colleagues probably share sh*t and and have terrible taste and you’re too nice to tell them that.
- There’s no AI inside the app because AI-everything is eating away at my ability to think. You can bring your own AI to use the MCP if you’d like. Did Claude help me build this? Yes. ✨Hypocrisy✨
- There’s no mobile app (yet), because references live on laptops. Your phone just sends stuff in.
- Everything leaves with you, whenever you want. No lock-in, no proprietary formats, no cheeky guilt tripping.
The name
Copywriters used to keep a swipe file: a shoebox of ads they’d torn out of magazines, kept so they could steal from them later. A pad is where you scribble stuff down. Savepad is the shoebox, with your context. For your next landing page. Or ad. Or biryani party. Whatever.
Personal, on purpose
Every team I’ve worked in had a shared inspiration board. A Notion page, a Slack channel called #inspo, a Miro board from the 2022 offsite. And every one of them turned into the same thing: 4,000 links nobody opened, saved by 12 people, with the poor taste of whoever spammed the files the most.
Your colleagues probably have terrible taste and share sh*t resources anyways. Sorry. Mine did too, and so did I. A swipe file is only useful if everything in it is something you stopped scrolling for. That’s the filter. The day someone else can drop things in, you stop trusting it, and a swipe file you don’t trust is just another bookmarks folder.
So Savepad is one person’s library. When you want to show someone a folder, send them a link, or make it public at my.savepad.app/@yourname. They can look around, but they can’t change anything. Everything else stays private, and out of Google, until you say you want it indexed too.
Are we leaving money on the table without a team plan? Most definitely.
No AI.
I hate it. Even though I use it every day for work.
Somewhere in the last two years I noticed I’d stopped braining like I used to. I used to remember where I’d seen that onboarding flow with the progress bar. Now I ask a chatbot, it tells me something that sounds right, and I’ll forget it by tomorrow. I’m not the only one. An MIT study put people in EEG caps while they wrote essays with and without ChatGPT, and the ChatGPT group’s brains were less engaged, and they struggled to quote what they’d just “written”. The researchers called it cognitive debt. We’re all getting stupider.
A swipe file is the opposite of that. Deciding what to keep and what to call it is the part that builds taste. If a model tags your saves, you get the average of everyone’s taste, with extra confidence sprinkled in. If a model summarises them, you remember the summary. You got inspired by stuff for a reason.
Trust your taste.
Which is why Savepad doesn’t summarise your saves, guess your tags, “chat with your library”, or do any semantic search. Nothing you save is ever sent to a model, and nothing you save trains one. Everything that looks smart is plain old parsing: page metadata, PDF text, recipe and product markup, map links, colours pulled from your images.
This is where I draw lines on how “smart” Savepad is:
- Text in your screenshots. Savepad runs OCR (Tesseract) on images and scanned PDFs, on our own servers, so search can find the words in them. It reads the words that are already in the picture. It doesn’t describe the picture, and it doesn’t guess what’s in it.
- No transcripts. Voice notes and audio stay as audio. Speech-to-text is a learning model, and I’m not adding one. Video URLs that come with transcripts can be enriched to let you find moments by text.
- Bring your own assistant, if you want one. Savepad has an MCP server, so you can point Claude, ChatGPT, or whatever you use at your library. Savepad never calls a model itself. If you connect one, it sees what you let it see, and you can cut it off in Settings.
No mobile app (yet)
Most references are found on a laptop and used on a laptop. Landing pages, emails, pricing pages, the Meta Ad Library, Figma files, GitHub repos. Browsing a swipe file on a phone means squinting at a landing page that was designed for 1440 pixels.
Your phone is where you find stuff, though. A reel, a billboard at the station, a restaurant menu with great type, an email you want to steal from later. So on your phone, Savepad is an email address:
- Share it to your Savepad address, from any app, like you’d send it to a friend.
- Forward the newsletter or the onboarding email you want to keep.
- Or tell your assistant to save it, over MCP.
It shows up in Unsorted, and you sort it later on a big screen with a coffee. And if you need to look something up on the train, the website installs as an app.
Savepad is a web app though, so you can “install” it on your phone if you still want to use it there. I don’t recommend it for more than just looking around though.
Previews are the product
Most bookmark apps show you a favicon and a title, which is how you end up with 2,000 bookmarks and no idea what any of them were. Savepad shows you the thing and the things inside the thing. A page opens in reading mode or as the screenshot from the day you saved it. An email renders as the email. A PDF opens at the page that matched your search. A place is a pin on a map. You get it.
And pages change. That landing page you liked in 2024 was redesigned 10 times already. Savepad keeps copies for you.
You sort it
Put things into folders as you save them, or leave them unsorted and deal with it later. No judgements. When the pile gets big, triage mode shows them one at a time and you file them with the keyboard. Spaces keep work and life apart, folders nest, tags stack, and one thing can sit in three folders at once, because that ad really belongs to Paid social, eCommerce AND Taglines.
Want a shortcut? Search, filter, and save it as a custom view.
Your stuff stays yours
Everything lives in the EU. Some of the tools we use are American, but we use their EU hosting.
I measure how the app gets used so I can make it better. I never measure what you save. Nothing personal ever gets into analytics. Your swipe file is private work.
Leaving must be easy
Pocket shut down in July 2025. Omnivore went in 2024. Some people lost years of saves. So everyone can export everything (files, spaces, folders, tags, notes) in formats other apps can read, like CSV and JSON, in a couple of clicks. No export tax, no “talk to sales”. And if Savepad ever shuts down, you get a looooong heads up: six months. And I’ll probably open source it so you can keep using it, The UI kinda grew on me.
Not for everyone
If these aren’t your opinions, other tools do this well:
- mymind is beautiful, and it uses AI to sort things for you. If you want that, it’s the best at it.
- Are.na is better if you want to share in public and follow other people’s channels.
- Milanote is better if you think on a canvas.
- Raindrop is cheaper, older, and on every platform.
There’s a longer list on the compare page, with Foreplay, Savee, Eagle, Notion, and the rest. You do you.
If you do share my opinions though, get on the list!