Every great product begins with a question you can't stop asking. Mine was: What if your data truly belonged to you?
The Spark
I'd spent the better part of two years inside a large engineering team, working on online documentation infrastructure. The codebase was aging. The tooling was borrowed from architectures designed for someone else's constraints. Every time a user lost work to a sync failure, or couldn't access their notes offline, I felt the gap between what we had and what was possible.
I started building experiments in the margins of my actual job — prototypes of a different kind of editor, one that kept your data on your device first and treated the server as optional rather than essential. A local-first architecture, before I'd even heard that phrase used widely.
Those experiments consumed my nights. And the more I built, the more convinced I became that the right answer couldn't live inside corporate walls.
The Leap
So I left. No roadmap approved by a committee, no guaranteed runway — just a conviction that the problem was real, the timing was right, and that the only honest way to build something people could truly trust was to build it in the open.
That decision was the founding moment of AFFiNE.
The Vision
AFFiNE is a next-generation knowledge base — a place where planning, organizing, and creating are one continuous flow, not three separate apps that barely talk to each other.
Privacy-first. Open-source from day one. Built to run on your machine, for real, not as a marketing footnote. The editor and the data layer are both open for anyone to inspect, fork, or contribute to.
We refused the trade-off that most tools accept quietly: that you must surrender ownership to get great features. That offline means falling behind. That collaboration requires handing your documents to someone else's cloud.
A Different Philosophy
With AFFiNE, your data stays on your device first. Collaboration happens when you choose to enable it — peer-to-peer, not routed through a platform that has interests of its own.
We're building the kind of tool I wish had existed when I first started asking these questions. Not because it's technically elegant, though I believe it is, but because it reflects a principle worth fighting for: the tools we use to think should work for us, not the other way around.
Looking Forward
I started AFFiNE because I believe the software we use to create and collaborate should empower us, not extract from us. We're early. There is a long road ahead.
But the question that started all of this hasn't changed.
What if your data truly belonged to you?
We're building the answer.
— Terry