AI canvas workspace
for your ideas.

Your inspiration, notes, and plans are scattered across tools.
Causal brings everything into one place.

Free on desktop

The most ambitious ideas require space to proliferate.
Give your plan the space it deserves.

Never lose a reference.

Spaced repetition

The gap between reviews matters more than the hours you put in.

Six weeks of notes and almost none of it stuck, which is the opposite of how I had assumed revision was supposed to work. The point was never to log more time at the desk. It was to be asked the question again just as the answer started to slip, which is a different thing entirely and much harder to schedule by feel.

What the studies agree on

  • Retrieval beats re-reading, even when it feels harder in the moment
  • The optimal gap widens after each successful recall of the same item
  • Spacing related items apart cuts the interference between them
  • Testing yourself is not just measurement, it is itself the study

Every scheduler still guesses at the timing. SM-2 quietly underpins most of them, and it was tuned back in 1987 on one person's flashcards. Nothing since has really replaced it, so the defaults every app ships with today are still, in effect, that same person's, carried forward because they were there, not because anyone re-ran the experiment at scale.

Conditions that slow acquisition often improve long-term retention (Bjork, 1994).

So I am rebuilding the deck around the gaps rather than the totals: shorter sessions, wider spacing, and no more re-reading the same page the night before.

Where it breaks down in practice

None of this is an argument against the algorithm, only against trusting it past the point where it is measuring anything real. A scheduler knows when a card was last seen and whether the answer came back right. It does not know that the answer came back right because the card sat directly underneath one that gave it away, or that two cards in the same deck are quietly teaching the same fact in slightly different words.

The failure mode is always the same, and it is not the maths. A deck grows past the point where its intervals mean anything, the daily queue turns into a backlog, and the backlog gets cleared by pressing the middle button on everything in it, which the scheduler reads as evidence that the intervals were correct, and duly widens them. The numbers stay healthy the whole way down.

  • Leeches: the few cards that fail over and over and eat a third of the session
  • Interference: near-identical cards that trade places in memory week to week
  • Backlog: a queue long enough that the grading stops being honest

What I have settled on is duller than a better algorithm and works far better than one. Delete the leeches instead of nursing them. Write cards that ask for one thing, so a wrong answer means something specific rather than that the card was too broad to answer. Keep the deck small enough that a bad week can be caught up in a day, because the moment it cannot be, every interval in it is a guess resting on a guess.

Text Editor

Store important information within text files with a built-in editor.

Iceland poppy from the Sunday market. Saving this one for the palette study.

Images

Save images, screenshots, and videos easily by pasting from clipboard.

An Infinite Space for Ideas
Add a linkcausal.so

A canvas where notes, images, and links connect into finished ideas.

Links

Keep track of useful links, sources, and references for your projects.

AI powered canvas

Carbon capture
What are the leading approaches to carbon capture?
Let me look into that and pull the key approaches onto your canvas.
Found 6 results
Direct air capture: state of the artnature.com
Carbon removal cost curves 2025iea.org
Card created
Placing on canvas…

Context Aware

The AI reads your entire canvas, understanding how your thoughts connect. It uses tools to create and organise ideas.

Weekly review

Three things moved this week, and the churn fix is the one that actually changed the numbers.

What changed

Onboarding shipped Tuesday, and the drop-off it was aimed at closed almost immediately.

  • Churn down 4% in the first week after the fix.
  • Pricing test starts Monday on the paid plans.

Two hires accepted, so the design review moves to Thursdays from the start of next month.

Native Output Generation

Transform prompts into canvas content. Whether it's notes, files, or web links, the agent creates and places ideas where you need it.

See what people are building.

App Flow, an example project laid out on a Causal canvas

App Flow

Map every screen in a product and the routes between them before anything gets built.

App Plan, an example project laid out on a Causal canvas

App Plan

Keep features, screens and what ships first in one view instead of three documents.

Brand Research, an example project laid out on a Causal canvas

Brand Research

Collect the brands, palettes and voices you are borrowing from and see them side by side.

Branding Board, an example project laid out on a Causal canvas

Branding Board

Settle type, colour and marks in one place so the whole team works from the same brand.

Competitor Research, an example project laid out on a Causal canvas

Competitor Research

Put every rival's product next to your own and find the gap you can actually take.

Onboarding Instruction, an example project laid out on a Causal canvas

Onboarding Instruction

Walk a new starter through the tools, the files and the people, one frame at a time.

Story Board, an example project laid out on a Causal canvas

Story Board

Block out a film shot by shot before anyone books a camera.

Video Brief, an example project laid out on a Causal canvas

Video Brief

Hand an editor the references, the tone and the deliverables on a single canvas.

Video Plan, an example project laid out on a Causal canvas

Video Plan

Follow a video from script to final cut, with every asset attached to its step.

Website Moodboard, an example project laid out on a Causal canvas

Website Moodboard

Gather the sites, type and colour a build should feel like before design starts.

Website Plan, an example project laid out on a Causal canvas

Website Plan

Lay out every page and what belongs on it before the first component exists.

Designed for productivity.

Infinite Canvas

Freeform and infinite canvas to hold endless ideas in one view.

Desktop App

Download on macOS so your workspace is always one click away.

Share

Create shareable links to send your workspaces to collaborators.

Collections

Group together related notes and files inside an organising frame.

Unsorted Tray

Stash away files that haven't found a place on the canvas.

Templates

Start off with templates made for various creative work.

See what people are saying.

Maya

Motion Designer

I started using it to plan a new concept animation I am working on, I love the UI it is so simple and clean. I also love the AI feature honestly everything about this is soo good

Ota

Product Designer

What I liked most is that everything lives in one place: images, links, docs, Figma files, call recordings - all the stuff I usually have scattered across different apps.

Isabel

Content Creator

I've been using Causal to organize my brand identity and map out the content strategy for my upcoming song release. It's been really helpful for visualizing my workflow and keeping my ideas connected in one place.

Simple Pricing.

Free

£0

/ forever

Get started
  • 100 notes, images, and links
  • 10 files
  • 5 widgets
  • Generous AI requests
  • Mac desktop app
  • Unlimited shares
  • Unlimited canvases

Pro

£8

/ month

Get started
  • Unlimited notes, images, and links
  • Unlimited files
  • Unlimited widgets
  • 10x AI requests

Common questions.

It's a spatial workspace. Instead of filing things into folders, you put your notes, files, images and links onto an infinite canvas and arrange them in a way that matches how you think conceptually. The layout is the organisation - similar ideas sit near each other, and connections represent relationships. It preserves causal relationships between ideas this way, so your brain can focus on what it does best: generating new ones.

Causal is the step before opening any creative tool. It's for creatives who see the benefit in planning before execution. Notion organises structure into pages and databases; Obsidian is plain markdown files. Causal's canvas stores rich text, files and images without restraining you to the structure of a page, so you have complete freedom in planning.

Yes, and it isn't a trial - the free plan doesn't expire and you don't need a card to start. You get 200 nodes, 50 AI requests a month, and every feature the canvas has: nothing is locked behind Pro. Pro raises those limits for when you outgrow them.

Yes. Any canvas can be turned into a read-only link in one click, and whoever you send it to can open it without an account. Sharing grants access to that canvas and any nested canvases within it. You can copy the link again or stop sharing at any point.

Three tools provide structure. Create a collection to pack nodes into tidy columns. Create a nested canvas inside a canvas when a topic needs its own space. And when you have something you don't want to place yet, drag it to the right edge and park it in the unsorted tray.

You can drop in anything up to 20 MB per file. PDFs, Word documents, Adobe files, markdown, spreadsheets, images and video all open fullscreen inside the app with real previews. Markdown files and CSVs can even be edited in place, saving straight back to the file. Anything else is stored safely and shows up as a card you can download whenever you need it.

Both. Notes sit directly on the canvas for fast, flexible thoughts, while longer pieces open into a dedicated full-page editor. Quick notes and full-page text files share the exact same rich formatting - headings, lists, checkboxes, quotes, code blocks, highlights, images and links.

Yes - there's a free Mac app, and it keeps itself up to date, so you only ever install it once. Open this page on a Mac and the download sits in the footer, under Product. There's no phone app: Causal needs a desktop-sized screen to be worth using, so that one is on the longer horizon.

No. Empty canvases come with a set of templates for different kinds of creative work, whatever your workflow - we have templates for app development, website design, branding, storyboarding, research and more.

Articles.

See all

Product design

Guide 5 min

Introducing MCP

Product 1 min

Vibe design

Guide 4 min

Free on desktop