About Datacea

There are excellent applications for tracking workouts, reviewing books, writing notes, and recording nearly every other part of a life. Many of them do one thing better than a general-purpose application ever could. But they also divide a person's history among separate accounts and databases. The records are difficult to connect with one another or use outside the context the service has chosen for them.

Social platforms bring many kinds of activity into one place, but impose a different cost. They place everything before a mixed audience, rank it through algorithms, and encourage people to shape their lives around attention and reaction. A personal history becomes content for a feed.

Datacea is building the opposite. Zicarium is a private place for the many kinds of information that make up a life. Its breadth is intentional: a workout can relate to a health record, a book to the person who recommended it, a recipe to a meal and the people who shared it. No single feature has to contain all of the value. Much of the value lies in the relationships between things.

Zicarium does not decide what deserves your attention. It has no algorithmic feed and no engagement target. Your information remains useful without being published, and it remains yours to keep or export. OwnTimeline is intended to extend that principle to sharing: you choose which records leave your private space and the context in which they appear.

What is free, and what we charge for

Zicarium's local application is free by design. You can keep, view, edit, import, and export your records without a subscription. If you stop paying for a Datacea service, your information does not become read-only and the application does not hold it hostage. You can continue using your records locally with the full fidelity the application supports.

We also want Zicarium to connect directly to useful outside services wherever that is practical. When a service allows you to supply your own credentials — such as your own API key for an assistant — we aim to let you do that without paying Datacea. Some lookups can run directly from the application using freely available services rather than passing through our servers.

What we expect to charge for is the infrastructure we operate on your behalf: seamless synchronization and backup across devices. Scan a receipt on your phone and find it on your laptop; make a change in one place and have it available everywhere else. That convenience requires an ongoing service. Access to your own records does not.

Our business depends on making that service worth paying for, not on making it difficult to leave.

Where things stand

Zicarium, our first application, is available on the web, with Android and desktop versions in development. It brings notes, tasks, recipes, readings, and the other things people keep track of into one place that works offline.

The app is in an early state of development. If something is broken or missing, telling us is genuinely useful — write to contact@datacea.com.