Your first hour
Sign in, take the short welcome or skip it, install it properly, put real work in, decide about the trial, and let the first sync finish before you go anywhere without signal.
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What the sandbox leaves out#
The sandbox runs in your browser with no account behind it, so a few parts of the app are off there. Each one says so on its own screen, with the reason and a Keep it button, instead of showing an error.
- Agent Pacts. A pact is a lasting record two agents keep about work they share.
- Sharing and invitations. Sharing an item, inviting someone or sending a connection request.
- Outside services. Canva, Google Calendar and Sheets, web recipe import, the recipe catalog and live exchange rates.
- File uploads. Attaching a file or rendering a whiteboard to an image.
- Memory. The Mind and the Weave: what The Margin remembers and the connections it suggests.
- Full Margin Intelligence and agents. Voice dictation, team agents and every tool that asks a model to do work. The assistant is here in a small form: it reads a summary of the sandbox, answers up to ten questions, and cannot change anything.
Open the assistant and ask about the household, like what is due this week or where the money went. Keep the sandbox and the full assistant takes over, on your own plan's allowance.
- Account and billing. Plans, billing, connected apps, notifications to your devices and email.
Everything else works on the made-up household and is saved in that browser only. Agents and MCP lists the reason for each one.
How long it lasts, and keeping it#
A sandbox lasts two days in the browser that made it (seven in the phone app). The banner at the top says how long is left, and in the last day it turns the accent color and Keep it becomes a full button.
Once you have added three things of your own (a shopping item, a note, a card, a meal, a habit), a small card asks whether you want to keep them. Three, because by then you are building something the sandbox would erase. Press Keep it, sign in with the link we email you (or Google or Apple), and what you made moves into your new workspace. Not now closes the card, and it does not ask again in that visit.
The sandbox records nothing about you. It keeps a one-word label for where you came from, like "reddit" or "direct", and we count a few steps as plain numbers per day. The privacy policy lists all of it.
Signing in#
The Margin signs you in with a magic link by email, with Google, or with Apple. There is no password to forget, and so no password to leak.
New accounts start on Free, which does not expire. The trial is something you start when you choose to, not a clock running down while you read the docs. See Plans and limits.
The welcome#
If you signed in with a magic link, the app first asks what to call you, since an email address carries no name. It is one field and the only question without a skip. Your first workspace starts out as "My Margin" and becomes "Alex's Margin" (with your own first name) once you answer; a workspace you have named yourself is never renamed. Change your name later in Settings→Profile.
A new account then opens on a short welcome: three panels about what the app is, then four steps.
- Name the workspace and say who it is for: just you, a household, or a team.
- Pick a look from the eight themes. The app changes as you tap.
- Put one real thing in, a note or a board.
- Decide how it reaches you: sounds, notifications on this device, and installing it as an app.
Skip setup is on every screen, and nothing is lost by pressing it. Whatever you did not get to stays in the Start here list on your dashboard, which is also where the trial offer lives.
To see the welcome again, open Settings→Help and reports, where Getting started replays it and can turn the Start here list back on. Typing "Replay onboarding" into the command palette does the same.
Install it as an app#
This matters more here than for most web apps. Offline only fully works once the app is installed and has cached itself.
- iPhone and iPad: open the site in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen.
- Android: Chrome offers Install in the address bar or the menu.
- Desktop: Chrome and Edge show an install icon at the right of the address bar.
Installed, it opens without browser chrome, keeps its own storage and updates itself in the background. A new version never reloads the page while you are looking at it. It waits until you leave the app for a while or follow a link, and a Refresh now prompt lets you take it straight away.
Put something real in#
The quickest way to find out whether this fits your head is to give it a week you actually have to get through.
- Make one board for a live project, not a demo board.
- Open the Planner and drag this week's work onto days.
- Write one note: a meeting, a decision, a half-formed idea.
- Press ⌘⇧K (on a phone, tap the feather in the header) and capture something to the Inbox without deciding where it goes.
Bringing existing work in#
- Notes
- markdown files and folders, a zipped Obsidian vault with its folders and wikilinks intact, or a Notion export.
- Boards
- a CSV file, or a Google Sheet kept in two-way sync rather than pasted once.
- Recipes
- a link or a paste.
The details are in Importing from other tools.
About the trial#
Start it when you have a real reason to, and start it in the workspace you are actually thinking of paying for. Choosing a household or a team in the welcome's first step starts it for that plan. Otherwise the offer waits in Start here.
Let the first sync finish#
Before you rely on offline, open the app on a connection and let it settle for a minute. The first sync is what writes your data into the local database.
After that, being offline is the normal state and not an error.