Values

Understanding our staff's is the best way to learn our product deeply and form an intuition for decisions we've made or will make in the future.

Security

We build Lockbook to be secure and private. We use high security defaults, for example users generate a private key, rather than a password which can be guessed or re-used. This private key is the only thing which lets a user access their content. There is no way to recover a key, implying the user is the highest authority for access control, not Lockbook staff.

Privacy

Similarly, we end-to-end encrypt all possible data, making it's content only accessible to the customer and the people they choose to collaborate with. This even applies to the names of files. The only data that Lockbook staff can access is the data that is technically required for the existence of our server.

Lockbook staff can access, for-instance: how many files you have, how large your documents are, and the overall structure of your file-tree.

Transparency

Many products claim they're secure and private, fewer still will use strategies like end to end encryption to limit their own staff's access, even fewer will open source all the code they write so you don't have to trust that the product actually works the way it claims to.

We believe that real security and closed source implementations are contradictory ideas.

Apart from our source code, most of our communication also happens publicly, in a discord server that anyone can join. All of product planning, defect triage, and overall prioritization also happens in public through github issues.

Low time preference

We enjoy working on Lockbook and take our time to build it right. Having a native client for each platform, building editing experiences from the ground up are the types of things that indicate our long term view of building Lockbook.

Since 2020 our staff has been working out of pocket to bootstrap Lockbook with a sustainable business model (rather than going the traditional VC route). This decision, while difficult, we hope will pay dividends and allow us to build in accordance with the values specified in this document indefinately.

Customer Centric

With most decisions we're thinking about what the healthiest outcome is for our customers. We chose open formats for editing text (markdown) and drawings (svgs) because it's in your best interest to be able to take the content you generate to any other platform in the future.

As a team we strongly believe in dog-fooding our product. Being customers ourselves is the best way to understand where our product is weak and requires further investments.