Signing in
The Margin uses magic links and Google sign-in. There is no password to forget, which also means there is no password to leak.
New accounts start on a 7-day trial of everything, no card. When it ends you drop to the free tier rather than being locked out. Your data stays, the ceilings come back. See Plans and limits.
Install it as an app
This matters more here than it does for most web apps, because the offline behaviour 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 from 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. If a new version deploys while you are mid-session you get a Refresh prompt rather than having the page yanked out from under you.
Put something real in
The fastest way to find out whether this fits your head is to give it a week you actually have to survive.
- 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
Qand capture something to the Inbox without deciding where it goes.
That last one is the habit worth forming first. Capture is supposed to be thoughtless; filing is a separate job you do later.
Bringing existing work in
Notes import from markdown files and folders, and the folder structure comes with them. Boards import from CSV, and from Google Sheets as a live two-way sync rather than a one-time paste. See Integrations.
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. Fly before it finishes and you get an app with nothing in it, which is not the promise but is what an empty local database looks like.
After that, offline is the normal state rather than an error state.