Penlapse

I switched to the Galaxy S25 Ultra a few months back. Just looking for a new phone, didn't really expect the S Pen to matter much. Turns out I got hooked on writing notes on the screen without noticing. Better than paper, somehow. Not sure why.

Downloaded Concepts — TopHatch's vector drawing app. Liked it from the first time I opened it. Editable strokes, infinite canvas, the things I actually needed. A few weeks in I was committed enough to seriously think about paying for Pro.

Then I went to buy Pro Lifetime. The catch hit immediately. Pro Lifetime is per platform. Brush packs are sold separately. I'm not the kind of person who stays on one phone forever — sometimes I'm on Galaxy, sometimes iPhone, sometimes iPad. Paying for the same software two or three times wasn't going to happen.

Maybe that's the business model on purpose. Maybe Concepts started life in native Kotlin years ago and migrating to a cross-platform stack would cost more than it earns. Maybe at thousands of strokes a canvas, cross-platform performance just isn't there yet. Nobody outside the team really knows.

But the developer brain wouldn't stop. The market is crowded — there's no shortage of sketching, drawing, and note-taking apps. So why try? Two angles I could push on. One: cheaper. One purchase, every device, no brush packs sold separately. Two: cross-platform from day one — modern Flutter means I'm not locked into a Kotlin / Swift split forever. Whatever the reason Concepts ended up where it is, I don't have to inherit it.

I've shipped at scale for clients — apps with 300,000+ users, projects that made companies real money. But I've never made a commercial product that was wholly mine, end to end — engine, brand, marketing, voice. Penlapse is that product.

The promise to myself: keep every stroke replayable. The promise to users: pay once, draw anywhere.

Phase 0 landed in April 2026 — a Flutter scaffold, the "Ink & Time" brand palette, the "Vector Anchor" logo system, and a 3-step iPad onboarding with self-drawing hero animations.

The monorepo also hosts the marketing site (Astro), admin dashboard (Next.js), and backend (Supabase for data, Firebase for telemetry — intentionally split).

Phase 1 is the heart — the drawing engine itself. Vector strokes, Catmull-Rom smoothing, infinite canvas, the .penlapse file format. After that: cloud sync, web purchases, growth.

I've spent years shipping for clients. Plenty of work I'm proud of. But I'd never made anything of my own and actually tried to sell it. This is the first time. Building and learning at the same time — turns out there's a lot of stuff that, on a client project, someone else just handled: pricing, copy, brand voice, the paywall flow.

The thing I keep noticing is that building for yourself takes way longer than building for a client. Most of it is me hesitating. With clients you ship fast — they decide, you execute. Here every decision is mine to live with. Worth it though. Even if Penlapse doesn't take off, the stuff I'm picking up along the way is going to stick.