Private beta · Windows desktop
Your mail, calendar, tasks and notes in one quiet window.
Beacon connects every Gmail account you own and merges them — separate inboxes, one combined inbox, and a single calendar that overlays every calendar you have. Then it adds the tasks, notes and journal you'd otherwise keep in three more apps, and one search box that reaches across all of them. All of it local-first, on your machine, with no telemetry.
Guiding you. Lighting the way.
Why it exists
Tab-stackers don't merge anything.
Tools like Shift or Ferdium put five webmail tabs behind five buttons. You still switch five times, and nothing is ever in one list. Beacon talks to Google's APIs directly — so it can genuinely combine your accounts instead of parking them side by side.
One list, five accounts
A real combined inbox, newest first, with a colour dot showing which account each message landed in.
One calendar, every source
Personal, work and shared calendars overlaid in a single grid — de-duplicated when the same calendar appears twice.
Four apps fewer
Tasks, projects, notes and a daily journal live in the same window. An email becomes a task that still links back to it, a task becomes time on your calendar, and one search box finds any of it.
Yours, not a service
No Beacon account, no server in the middle, no analytics. Your data stays on your machine.
What's inside
Six modules that already know each other.
Everything below is shipping today in the beta — not a roadmap.
Mail
Every Gmail account, separate and together
Connect as many Gmail or Workspace accounts as you like. Read each inbox on its own, or drop into the combined inbox and work the whole morning in one list.
- Compose, reply and forward — with a rich editor and recent-recipient suggestions
- Triage at speed: read/unread, star, archive, trash, move — single or in bulk
- Real Gmail labels and folders in the sidebar, plus Beacon's own cross-app tags
- Turn an email into a task or a note in one click — the task keeps a live link back to the message, and the message shows that work is attached to it
- Background sync keeps the list fresh; unread counts ride the taskbar icon
Calendar
One grid for every calendar you own
Beacon pulls the calendars from all your accounts and overlays them — month, week or agenda. It's fully writable, so you plan here instead of in a browser tab. And because your tasks live in the same app, you can drag one onto the grid and give it a slot.
- Drag a task onto the grid to block time for it — a planner rail lists what still needs a slot, grouped by how soon it's due
- Create, edit, delete — drag to move, drag the edge to re-time
- Per-calendar colours and visibility toggles that stick
- Shared calendars de-duplicated, and edits routed through the account that owns them
- Recurring events, locations, and read-only handling for subscribed calendars
Tasks & projects
An engineering tracker, pointed at one person's life
Not a to-do list with a checkbox. This is the kind of tracker software teams run: statuses you define, projects with sub-projects, priorities, labels, comments, an activity log, and cycles that carry unfinished work forward. Keyboard and mouse are both first-class.
- Statuses, projects (with sub-projects) and labels you rename, recolour and reorder
- Filters, grouping and display options you save as named views and come back to
- Cycles with a burn-up chart and carry-over; recurring tasks; a hard deadline separate from the due date
- Comments, reminders and a full activity log on any task; drag between statuses or never touch the mouse
- Block time for a task by dragging it onto the calendar — kept in Beacon, never written to a shared calendar
Notebook & journal
Notes that link to the rest of your day
A block editor with the shortcuts you already know — / for anything,
markdown as you type, checklists, images, maths. Notebooks and sections keep it ordered.
-
Reference a task with
@— and see backlinks on the task - Version history, table of contents, collapsible sections
- A dated journal with an "on this day" panel: what you wrote, what was due, what you attended
Home
A calm start page, not a fourth inbox
Beacon opens on My Beacon: today's schedule, the handful of tasks that actually matter, what's unread, and whatever you pinned. Every card is glanceable and every card deep-links into the module behind it.
- Reorder, hide or pin cards to build your own cockpit
- Quick actions for a new task, a new event or straight to the inbox
- Or set any module as your landing screen instead
Momentum
Streaks that forgive a bad day
A day counts if you hit your task goal or write a journal entry — so either kind of work keeps the run alive. Pick weekly rest days, and a freeze quietly absorbs one unexpected miss instead of wiping months.
- Current and longest streak, tasks completed, active days
- 30-day completion chart against your goal, plus a 16-week heatmap
- Derived from what Beacon already recorded, so your history lights up on day one
The end of the day
Close the day out, don’t just close the laptop.
Drag a task onto your calendar and you have made a plan. The other half of the loop is coming back to it. Beacon already knows what you booked time for, what you finished, what tomorrow holds and where you write things down — so it can ask you the useful question instead of showing you a chart.
Day and week
What you finished, what slipped, what’s coming
Four steps, in that order. The middle one is the point: every task you set aside time for and didn’t get to, each with the decision attached rather than just the bad news.
- Move it to tomorrow at the time you originally picked, drop the block, finish it, or bin it — or move everything at once, for the evenings when that’s the honest answer
- Tomorrow’s meetings and booked time, while you’re still thinking about today — and it says so plainly when tomorrow is empty
- A reflection prompt that fits the day rather than the date: finish plenty and drop nothing, and it won’t ask you what went wrong
- Anything you write lands in that day’s journal entry, underneath what’s already there — not in a separate place you’d have to remember
- The weekly version draws a bar per day, so a lopsided week is something you can see rather than something you suspect
One box for all of it
Search once, not four times.
Your notes app cannot search your inbox. Your inbox cannot search your notes. Beacon searches both, plus your tasks and your calendar, from a single box. That is the part four separate apps can never do, no matter how good each one is.
Ctrl + F, anywhere
Mail, tasks, notes and events in one result list
Press it in any module and start typing. Results come back grouped by where they live, every Gmail account searched together, and the module you were already in sorted first. Arrow keys move, Enter opens the real thing in its real view.
- All your accounts' mail searched at once, next to your local tasks, notes and journal
- Grouped by kind, collapsible, and weighted toward the module you're standing in
- Fully keyboard-driven: type, arrow, Enter — a mail result opens the reader, a task opens the task
- Tasks, notes and events are searched locally, so those results are instant and work offline
Privacy by architecture
There is no Beacon server.
Your mail never passes through us, because there's no "us" in the path. Beacon talks to Google from your machine, caches locally, and — if you want more than one device — syncs through storage you own.
Tokens in the OS keystore
Google credentials are encrypted by the operating system, never written to the cache, never logged, and never visible to the interface layer.
Local-first cache
A local database holds your mail metadata, calendars, tasks and notes — so Beacon starts instantly and keeps reading when the connection drops.
No telemetry, ever
No analytics, no crash pings, no product metrics. The only network calls Beacon makes are to Google's APIs on your behalf.
Sync through your own Drive
Multi-device sync is bring-your-own-storage: an encrypted bundle in your Google Drive, end-to-end, readable only by devices you've joined.
Backed up on your own machine
“No server” shouldn’t mean “no safety net.” Beacon keeps rolling copies of its database beside it, takes a fresh one every time it starts, checks the file is intact before opening it — and if it isn’t, restores the last good copy and tells you what it did.
Email opened in a sandbox
Message bodies render in a locked-down frame with remote images blocked by default — trackers don't fire unless you ask for the pictures.
Quiet auto-updates
New versions download in the background and install when you restart. A "what's new" note tells you what changed — nothing else changes on its own.
Private beta
Ask for a build.
Beacon is in daily use and shipping updates weekly, but access is invite-only while it's still Windows-only. Send a note and you'll get an installer and the release feed.
Details
Questions worth answering.
Which platforms does it run on?
Windows today, as a normal desktop install. Beacon is built on web technology with the platform-specific parts kept thin, so macOS and a hosted web client are planned — but neither is available yet, and we'd rather say so than pre-sell it.
Does it work with Outlook, iCloud or IMAP?
Not yet. Beacon speaks Gmail and Google Calendar directly — including Google Workspace accounts — which is what lets it merge accounts properly rather than stack tabs. Other providers would each need their own integration.
How does it see my mail? What does it ask for?
You sign in to each account through Google's own consent screen, in your real browser. Beacon asks for read-and-modify access to mail (so triage and sending work) and calendar read plus write. It never sees your Google password, and you can revoke any account from your Google account settings at any time.
What happens to my data if I stop using it?
Nothing leaves with us, because nothing was ever with us. Mail and calendar live in Google; the local cache is a file on your disk you can delete. Tasks, notes and journal entries are yours locally, and the sync bundle sits in your own Drive.
Can I use it on two computers?
Yes. Sync is bring-your-own-storage: one device creates an encrypted bundle in your Google Drive, then you join a second device with a key. Tasks, notes, journal, tags and settings stay in step — mail and calendar come straight from Google on each machine.
What does it cost?
Nothing during the private beta. Pricing hasn't been set; if and when it lands, beta users hear it from us first rather than from a paywall.
Close the other nine tabs.
One window for the whole day — and it keeps your data where it belongs.