Your Work Is Yours
Your outlines are your thinking. We believe a thinking tool earns trust by making one thing unmistakable: your work belongs to you — not to us, and not to our file format.
Your outlines live on your device, in files you can read
On your Mac, every outline is a plain, human-readable file in your own Documents folder. No vault, no proprietary blob, no database only we can open. You can look at your files, copy them, back them up, and take them anywhere — with or without IdeaM.
In the web version, your outlines are stored in your browser, on your device. On iPhone and iPad, they live in the app's own storage on the device. Either way: your content stays with you — we run no background sync of your outlines to our servers.
No lock-in — and we prove it
IdeaM exports to 23 formats: Word, PDF, Markdown, OPML, plain text, ePub, LaTeX, Obsidian, Notion, Evernote, mind maps, CSV, slides, websites, and more. Two promises come with that:
- A complete export always exists. The native IdeaM format is a structured file that carries everything — your hierarchy, content, tags, colors, links, all of it — and it round-trips back in without loss. We test this automatically.
- No format pretends to keep more than it does. Markdown can't hold seven levels of headings; a tweet stops at 280 characters. Where a format has limits, we say so plainly — see the table below. What we will never do is quietly drop your work and call the export a success. Our automated test suite treats silent loss as a bug that blocks a release.
| Format | What it keeps | Where it has limits |
|---|---|---|
| IdeaM outline (.idm) | Everything — hierarchy, content, tags, colors, dates, links, IDs. Export → re-import verified lossless. | Nothing. This is the complete backup format. |
| OPML | Full hierarchy, names, content; tags, colors and completion with “Include metadata”. | Rich-text formatting becomes plain text; IDs are regenerated on re-import. |
| Markdown | Hierarchy to 6 levels, all names and content. | Markdown has no 7th heading level — deeper levels flatten; metadata is not carried. |
| Word (.docx) | Every node as real Word headings (9 levels) and paragraphs. | Deeper levels flatten; formatting is simplified; no metadata. |
| A finished document — title page, table of contents, index, every node. | A picture of the outline, not a data file — re-import from .idm instead. | |
| Plain text | Every node at its indent level. | The name-vs-content distinction and all formatting and metadata. |
| Obsidian / Notion | All nodes, in each app’s own conventions (wiki-links, toggles). | Formatting flattens to the target app’s style; metadata is not carried. |
| Slides (Reveal.js) | Sections → sub-slides → bullets — three levels, by design. | Levels deeper than three are omitted from the deck — that’s the format’s shape. |
| Twitter/X thread | A numbered thread of your outline. | Posts stop at 280 characters — long items split or truncate with an ellipsis. |
Condensed from our full fidelity audit of all 23 formats: 1 verified lossless, 22 with their limits documented, 0 silently lossy — checked by an automated harness on every release.
Deleting means deleting — with a safety net first
Your outline data is sacred, so deletion is designed to protect you from accidents and respect your decision:
- On the Mac, deleting an outline moves its file to your system Trash — recoverable until you empty it, gone when you say so.
- The Mac app also keeps a short trail of automatic local snapshots (the 20 most recent per outline) so a slip is never a catastrophe. These live on your device and are pruned automatically.
- On iPhone, iPad, and the web, outlines live in the app's on-device storage, and deleting one — after you confirm — removes it from that storage immediately. There is no Trash to fish it back out of on those platforms, so if you might want an outline later, export a copy first. Deleting really deletes.
What leaves your device — only what you send, when you send it
IdeaM has no background sync of your outlines to our servers. Content leaves your device only when you invoke something that needs it:
- AI features send the relevant text to the AI provider you chose — including your own key (BYOK) or a local on-device model, in which case it goes exactly where you pointed it. We don't keep a server-side copy of what you send.
- Share links publish a snapshot of your outline, rendered as a read-only page, only when you click Publish — hosted on our own infrastructure, never a third party. Unpublish deletes that snapshot from our servers immediately, and the link stops working right away.
- Your account (if you create one) stores your sign-in identity, your beta or plan status, your AI usage counts — numbers, not content — any pages you've published, and feedback or bug reports you choose to send us. That's the whole list. Your outlines themselves are never part of it.
External AI agents can read and suggest — never change
If you connect outside AI assistants to your outlines (through our assistant connection), they get a strict deal: read-only access, and every change they want becomes a proposal you approve or reject inside IdeaM. No agent — ours or anyone's — silently edits your work.
The plain-English summary
Your outlines: readable files, on your device. Your exports: complete and honest. Your deletions: real, with a safety net on the Mac. Your data on our servers: only what you chose to share. Your approval: required for any outside change. That's the deal, and our automated tests hold us to it.
Related: Privacy Policy · FAQ