Features
Everything it does.
Thirty-seven spaces in seven groups, over one database on your own server. Here is the whole thing — including the parts that deliberately aren't there, which are on this page rather than left off it.
The tour
Group by group.
These are the product's own groups, in the product's own order — the same ones you pick from on first run.
The day, and the work in it
Today is where you land: what's due, what you logged, and the modules you chose to keep in front of you. Underneath it are tasks as a list or a board with priorities, labels, due dates and goals; projects that pull their tasks, notes, events, contacts and files onto one page — linked, never moved; and a calendar with month, week, day and agenda views over all of it. Routines are repeatable checklists with streaks. Countdowns pin the dates you're waiting on.
- Projects · Today · Tasks
- Calendar · Countdowns
- Reminders · Routines
- Notes, notebooks, wiki-links, daily journal
The things that aren't lists
Infinite freeform whiteboards you can sketch, diagram and arrange on, panning and zooming forever. A gallery of photos, screenshots and scans stored on your server's own disk, captioned and gathered into albums. Ranked lists of what you like. And a map you drop pins on — the tiles are public, your pins never leave your server.
- Canvases · Gallery
- Rankings · Maps
- Albums, captions, file versions
- Attach a canvas to any project
Finances, with the numbers that actually happened
Transactions, budgets, subscriptions and savings goals in one ledger — plus an optional read-only bank connection through SimpleFIN Bridge. Read-only by construction: DoveBoard issues data reads only and has no code path that could move money. Each bank account belongs to a lens, and balance snapshots roll up into a net-worth metric per lens.
- Budgets and recurring transactions
- CSV import, deduplicated
- Optional bank sync, read-only
- Net worth, one point per day
Contacts, and the accounts you work with
An address book of people and places, linkable from notes and — in the Business lens — markable as clients and suppliers. Alongside it: direct messages between accounts on your server that only the two people in a conversation can read, not even an admin; boards, check-ins, a shared schedule and an activity feed for a small team; and a place where records other accounts shared with you live without mixing into your own lists.
- Contacts · Messages
- Team · Shared with me
- Per-record view or edit sharing
- Explicit, and revocable
Lead to invoice, and the work in between
The eleven spaces the Business lens adds. A deal moves through the pipeline with a stage probability and a number attached to the month; an accepted quote converts into an invoice or a job; a job gets scheduled, checklisted, photographed and its parts logged; the hours land on a timesheet and come back as unbilled time ready to invoice. Inventory derives every quantity from a movement ledger rather than a stored number. Health puts the vital signs on one screen — unpaid invoices, open pipeline, recurring revenue, jobs, hours and stock value.
- Health · Operations · Decision Log
- Pipeline · Quotes · Invoices · Jobs
- Inventory · Purchasing · Documents
- Timesheets, billed and unbilled
The ones that earned their place
A file vault with nested folders, versions and previews, for documents that belong to no single record. A hub of standalone utilities — a calculator, a domain checker, a study lab, a Bible reader and a photo studio. Small sharp games with shared leaderboards and earned badges. A log of things that went right, so a hard month has evidence to argue with. Charts and streaks computed from everything above, with monthly and yearly recaps. And Insights, which looks for signals across your whole workspace that move together — and refuses to show you anything that could be coincidence.
- Resources · Fancy Tools
- Brain Games · Wins
- Stats, with recaps
- Insights, across every space at once
The workspace itself
Every change this account made, filterable by what happened and when. A trash that holds deleted items for thirty days before purging them. And settings — your account, this workspace, and every preference in it, including which of the thirty-seven spaces exist at all for you.
- History · Trash · Settings
- 30-day restore window
- Spaces manager, with presets
- Time zone per account, not per device
Security
What guards it — and where that stops.
Self-hosting moves responsibility to you, so the honest thing is to say exactly what the software does and exactly where its protection ends.
Sessions
Every page needs one
An unauthenticated visitor reaches the login screen and the data-free app plumbing, and nothing else. Pages redirect; API and file routes answer 401. Session tokens are random 256-bit values in an httpOnly cookie, and the database stores only their HMAC.
Passwords
argon2id, and a real lockout
Per-account and per-IP rate limiting with exponential backoff. Every attempt — success, failure, or rate-limited — lands in the audit log with the IP that made it.
Two-factor
Optional, and hard to lock yourself out of
Standard TOTP: six digits, thirty seconds, one step of drift, so any authenticator app works. It stays off until you confirm one code, and ten single-use recovery codes are issued at that moment. Turning it off needs the password and a code.
At rest
AES-256-GCM on the secrets
Bank credentials, provider API keys, two-factor secrets and bank account identifiers. This protects a leaked backup, a stolen database copy, or a disposed drive. It does not protect a compromised running server — the app needs the key to work, and the app says so in red.
Security log
Yours, and not trashable
Sign-ins with device and IP, failed attempts, lockouts, password changes, account switches, portal access, exports. Owner-only — there is no admin read path — read-only, and only the retention window ever removes a row.
Backups
Nightly, rotated, and pre-update
03:30 local time, a WAL-safe snapshot rather than a raw file copy, keeping the newest archive of the last seven days and the last four weeks. Plus an automatic verified snapshot before any update is allowed to touch the database.
Under the hood
One database, and the decisions that follow from it.
The lens is a filter, not a fork
Every user-data row carries which domain it belongs to, personal or business, and the toggle filters on that column. Never two codebases, never two databases — which is exactly why a question can cross from one side to the other.
Switching costs nothing
Each space loads both domains once and filters in memory, so flipping between Personal and Business re-renders with no network round-trip at all.
Money is integers, dates are dates
Money is stored in minor units, so nothing rounds oddly. Calendar dates are stored as dates and never shift with a time zone; instants are stored in UTC and shown in the zone you set — per account, following your setting rather than the device, so travelling doesn't move your streaks or your day boundaries.
Migrations run behind a safety net
They apply at boot, inside one transaction, after an automatic verified snapshot. A fresh install initialises itself; there is nothing to run by hand.
Limits
What it doesn't do.
These are here for the same reason they're in the product's own documentation: finding out afterwards is worse than reading it now.
No push notifications
Reminders fire while a tab is open. The app says so rather than implying otherwise.
No mobile app
It installs as a progressive web app, which is a website in a window. That's a real thing, and it isn't an App Store listing.
One server
No clustering, no replication. It's one machine, and the answer to that is the backups.
Small teams only
Sharing is per record between accounts on one install. No roles, no per-project permissions, no organisation hierarchy.
Questions
The things people ask first.
What does self-hosted actually mean?
The software runs on a computer you control instead of ours. You install DoveBoard on a machine at home or in an office, it keeps its data there, and you reach it over your own network or through your own tunnel. There is no account on our servers, because there is no server of ours in the path at all.
What hardware do I need?
Less than you'd think. DoveBoard runs in Docker and is happy on a small mini PC — the kind that costs a couple of hundred dollars and draws less power than a light bulb. A spare laptop works. It does not need a server rack, though it will happily live in one.
Do I need to be technical?
You need to be able to follow written instructions and not be frightened of a terminal window. Installing is a clone and one Docker command; migrations run themselves on first boot. If you have ever set up a Plex server or a Pi-hole, this is the same level of effort.
Who owns my data?
You do, in the only sense that matters: it is on your disk, in a database file you can copy, and nothing in the application transmits it anywhere. There is no telemetry and no crash reporting to us. The app backs itself up nightly, and you should keep a copy somewhere that isn't the machine it lives on.
Can I get my data out again?
Yes, and it's one button. Settings → Export writes an archive holding every record the account owns as JSON, the prose as markdown, the tables as CSV, and the actual files you uploaded — with a manifest that counts each table twice, once from the query that wrote the file and again from the database afterwards, and lists any disagreement by name rather than smoothing it. Encrypted fields are decrypted on the way out, because it's your own data. Credentials are not, because exporting a credential would be a security hole rather than ownership.
What if I don't want to run my own server?
Then DoveBoard isn't the right fit today, and we'd rather say so than sell it to you anyway. Self-hosting is the point of the product, not a mode of it — a copy running on our servers wouldn't keep the promise. What will change is the effort: a Windows desktop application is planned, so running your own copy stops meaning learning a terminal. It's planned and not built, and there is no date on it.
Is this built with AI?
Yes, extensively, and we'd rather say it plainly than have you find out. AI-assisted engineering is how a team this small ships something this large. Every line still gets reviewed, tested, and run in production by the person who built it — on his own hardware, every day.
Pre-launch
Be there on day one.
One email when DoveBoard is ready to install and ready to buy. Early access goes out in waitlist order.
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