Mindchuk turns a text message into a note, and it's the cleanest way I've found to capture ideas on the go

Patrick is a seasoned writer with more than a decade of experience, specializing in any and all things tech. His work has been featured on platforms like CNET, Yahoo, Xfinity, and many other outlets. When not typing away, he can be found with his nose in a book. 

When an idea strikes you, how do you keep track of it? Some of us write it down in a notebook or on our phones. Others use voice memos. Whatever your approach, it's likely you'll either forget the idea or where you wrote it down. You'll search for it, give up, and then stumble upon the note years later. No? Just me? I wanted a solution for keeping all my notes and ideas in one place, preferably with a method that works on busy days.

Obsidian has always been my primary note-taking tool, but it wasn't always feasible (especially while I'm away from my desk). I have a note in Apple Notes titled "Stray Thoughts" where I jotted down everything. I also have at least four notebooks in my car with ideas scribbled in them. It's chaos, and I needed a better solution. That's when I discovered Mindchuk. The app showed up on Instagram as a cross-platform alternative that required no download or subscription and was accessible for a one-time payment.

Zach Willing, Mindchuk's founder, gave me access to try the app. After a few days of testing, I'm thoroughly impressed by what this app brings to the table. It's an interesting, responsive take on note-taking.

I can text anything I want to save straight to Mindchuk

It turns my phone into my primary note-taking tool

The first thing that stood out to me about Mindchuk was its ability to take notes through an SMS message. When you create an account, you receive a specific Mindchuk number. You can then text that number directly with anything, and it will appear on your Mindchuk page. And I do mean anything; I've sent paragraphs of text, single sentences, images, and more. Code snippets appeared on the board, and the social media links I sent all showed up with short previews (although I did find it more efficient to title the link when sending it in).

Mindchuk is more than just notes, too. You can create checklists that you can edit straight from your main Mindchuk page, as well as reminders for tasks and events. These reminders can be set up to recur at specific times and days of the week, too. Checking items from the list will visible cross them out and note your progress toward completion in the top-right corner of the note, and you can set keywords that will automatically add new messages to the checklist.

The reason the ability to take notes through text stood out so much is because my phone is the one device I always have on-hand. I don't always carry a notebook, and sometimes Apple Notes can be a hassle to open. I created a contact for Mindchuk, so now I can just ask Siri to text the number with whatever idea I have in my head and it will be there for me to review later.

It's like a digital Obsidian

I make no attempt to hide my love for Obsidian, but again, it's far more usable on a laptop than it is on mobile. Even opening my vault makes my iPhone beg for mercy, despite the Obsidian team's repeated updates to make the app a little more user-friendly. Obsidian's tag system is powerful, and Mindchuk uses a similar system to organize things within your board. There are no folders; everything lives in one place, although you can choose to view only notes with a specific tag. A search bar at the top lets you search by text or the date the note was created.

It's easy to group things under specific tags, like #recipes or #storyideas. This isn't limited to desktop users, either; just type the hashtag in the text to the Mindchuk number and it will automatically be added and easy to find later.

Mindchuk is still new, and there's a lot of room to grow

But I don't know that I can justify $99

Mindchuk has only been around for a short while, but it already has an impressive number of features. I found myself taking more notes than normal while using it, especially after I started using Siri to handle the messaging. Anytime an idea came to me, I could just speak out loud and know that it will be waiting for me. It's also solved a problem that has plagued me for years: ideas coming to me as I'm falling asleep. When I'm comfortable in bed, I don't want to grab my phone and sear my retinas with its backlight, no matter how good the idea is. Now, I can just tell Siri to send the message to Mindchuk, and I can ramble through whatever is in my head without opening my eyes.

Right now, Mindchuk is available for a limited time for a reduced price. However, its full cost is a one-time payment of $99. Even with the higher cost of its servers and SMS processing, that still feels a bit too high for what it offers. Mindchuk is impressive, and I love that it's a one-time payment — that's refreshing in an age of endless, ever-stacking subscriptions — but it's also a not-insignificant amount of money. I'd happily pay $50 for a service like this, but $99 feels like a lot.

I'd also like to see a few other features. While Mindchuk makes it easy to view previous notes, there's currently no way to download them. You can copy and paste it, and you can always save the images straight to your machine, but it would be nice to get a consolidated download of everything on the board at once (perhaps as markdown, so I can load it straight into Obsidian for long-term data hoarding?).

I already took a lot of notes, but that number has easily doubled

As I said before, Mindchuk is a cool application. I appreciate the lack of downloads and subscriptions, but most of all, I love how easy it has made note-taking. I get dozens of ideas each day. I discard some immediately, while I write others down to revisit later. Mindchuk lets me toss those ideas into a safe place until I have time to return to them, so I forget far fewer incredible ideas because I was too busy to write them down when they crossed my mind.