Cognate
Every part of a working life in one place — your mail and calendar, the people, the commitments, the projects, the reading, the notes — where it all connects itself, sorts itself by which hat you're wearing, and stays on a machine you own.
Join the beta list30 days free · $19/month for the first 200 · no card to start
A client record, six days after connecting an account. Nobody typed any of it.
A different way of working
Not because you wanted to. Because it was the only thing that remembered. The message stays in the inbox — not to be read again, but because it is the only proof the promise was made. Then there are four thousand of them, and a folder structure, and a rule you wrote in 2019 that you're afraid to delete.
Everything else got the same treatment. The tab stays open because closing it loses the thought. The note gets written twice because you can't remember where the first one went.
You became the index.
In Cognate, a message becomes the thing it actually was — and the message doesn't go anywhere.
…that all works. Can you get me the revised scope by Friday so I can take it to the partners on Monday?
Before
After — and the message is still there, intact
A commitment, a person, a decision, a document. One gesture, and the email stays whole and attached to what it created. Nothing is summarised away. Nothing is retyped.
Which is why inbox zero stops being a discipline and becomes a side effect. You archive without hesitation, because there is nothing left in there that isn't now somewhere better.
Everything, together
The average knowledge worker opens eighteen applications a day and switches between them thirty-three times — about forty-four hours a year spent on nothing but the crossing. Cognate is the six of them you were only running because nothing else would hold that part of your life.
A personal CRM that fills itself — every correspondent, organisation and relationship, built from the traffic. Last contact, open threads, what you owe whom.
Real plans, not a checklist. Milestones, decisions, dependencies without loops, a critical path, and a runway measured from the pace you actually keep.
What matters this quarter, held as a first-class thing rather than a note, so you can see whether the week moved anything that counts.
A reader scored against what each hat actually cares about, that learns from what you keep. One row per story, however many outlets carry it.
A block-oriented editor over typed objects — people, organisations, situations, trips, anything you define. Any dimension of a life, linking like everything else.
Real files in a folder you can open. Read on arrival, filed against the thread and task they answer, searchable inside — including scans.
They are not six integrations. They share one data model, one set of links, and one idea of who everybody is — which is why the person knows about the project, and the project knows about the document.
Where it sits
Nothing migrates. Cognate signs in to Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, iCloud, or plain IMAP and CalDAV — several at once, which is the normal condition for anyone with more than one life — and reads and writes straight to them. Archive something here and it is archived there. Disconnect tomorrow and your mail is exactly where it always was.
What changes is the experience on top: every account in one triage, every calendar in one week, replies going out from the address the message came to, and all of it feeding the same fabric as everything else.
Everything belongs to one of your lives. The connections form themselves. An assistant that already knows the situation.
Everything here is Cognate's — except mail and calendar, which read and write straight to the accounts below.
Every hat, one plane
A day job, two boards, a couple of clients, a family. Different people, different obligations, different tolerances for interruption — and quietly, different rules about what may be seen and by whom.
Cognate calls them hats. Everything belongs to one, and each carries its own bar for what reaches you, so a loud hat never drowns an important one. Work inside a single hat and see nothing else — or stand above all of them and catch the Thursday where three collide.
Hats fly burgees — a small flag at the edge of every row, so you always know which life you're looking at.
Ari
Every other assistant starts from nothing. You paste in the background, it answers, it forgets — and the answer is capped by how much context you were willing to retype.
Ari starts from your fabric. She knows who this person is and what you agreed with them in March. She knows which hat it belongs to and what is already on your plate. She has read the document, because it was filed against the thread it arrived in.
And she doesn't only answer. She updates the task, builds the plan, drafts the reply, books the meeting — describing every change in plain English, each with its own checkbox, before anything happens. What she writes is signed and traceable, so you can always tell her words from yours.
You agreed a revised scope on 14 September, in the thread Re: Phase 2 boundaries. Dana asked for it by Friday and it hasn't gone out. The signed SOW is still outstanding on her side since the 9th.
I can set this up:
A working amount of AI comes with the subscription — nothing to set up on day one. Add your own key and it picks up where the included allowance ends.
Prefer nothing metered through us at all? Run on your key exclusively. Requests go straight from your machine to the provider, under your account, with Cognate out of the loop.
Summaries, planning, triage and mail suggestions each carry their own setting, so you can spend on the work that deserves it and not on the rest.
Reading and connecting run on their own — that is the product. Acting never does: every change is shown before it is made. Anything marked Keep from AI is never sent at all.
Yours, and quiet
Mail indexed locally. Documents as ordinary files in a folder you can open and back up without Cognate. It works with the network off, and sync between your devices runs through your own iCloud — there is no Cognate server holding your content, because there is no Cognate database to hold it in.
Privacy is two switches, because the two fears are different: keep this from AI, and keep this out of exports and sharing. Set either on a hat, a type of thing, or a single item. The strictest setting wins, and every item tells you which rule is in force.
Export everything, in open formats, from the first day. If you leave, the fabric leaves with you.
What it costs
No card to start, and the trial runs its full length either way. One person, every hat, every device — no seats, nothing to administer.
The first 200 people to subscribe keep this price for as long as they stay. It does not expire and it does not step up.
Everyone after that. A working amount of AI is included at both tiers.
Cognate is in private alpha and opens to a public beta shortly. The list is how you get in, and the second question decides the order — it tells me which connectors matter most to the people actually waiting.
I'll write when your invite is ready — one email, from a person. If your stack is an unusual one, don't be surprised if I ask you about it first.
Cognate runs on macOS, iPhone and iPad. Meeting recording and cross-calendar holds need the Mac; transcription is US English today. AI runs on Anthropic's Claude models, so a bring-your-own key means an Anthropic key. Switching figures: Hubstaff and Lokalise, February 2026.