I built
what I was missing.

I've been playing chess since I was a teenager. I'm not a master — I'm one of those, and there are thousands of us, who sit between 1500 and 2000 ELO, who take the game seriously, who puts time into study but doesn't have a full-time coach. The profile is recognizable: constant need to improve the repertoire, but without the continuous guidance of someone telling you exactly what to study.

For years I tried everything. Thick books I opened once and then never again. Chessable courses that started well and ended halfway through. PGN files scattered across folders I never reopened. Lichess studies I shared and then forgot where I'd put them. Every tool solved one piece, none closed the loop.

The turning point came one evening, in the middle of an online game. I was in a Sicilian Najdorf I'd studied three times in the two weeks before. Move eight: a standard line. The right move, the move I'd noted in three different PGN files — I couldn't find it. I lost the game in twenty moves. That's when I realized the problem wasn't the study. It was that I was studying badly.

Chessable is great, but it is built around its courses, and its MoveTrainer schedules reviews on fixed levels rather than adapting to each position. Lichess has excellent studies but no review scheduler for them. ChessBase is powerful, but it is database software, not a daily drill. Anki with chess add-ons works, but for me it took a lot of setup and upkeep.

None of these alternatives could do three things together: let me build MY repertoire in a visual tree, drill it with modern spaced repetition, close the loop with my real games. Every tool was a compromise — either you paid, or there was no FSRS, or no Lichess import, or the built-in engine analysis was missing.

I opened a code editor in the summer of 2024 and wrote the first lines of what would become the ChessNotes canvas. The initial goal was absurd — a tool just for me: a board I could branch from and a simple drill. The scope grew organically, every feature born from a real problem lived first-hand.

ChessNotes is an independent tool. No investors, no exit strategy, no imposed growth plans. It's just me; the infrastructure runs on Firebase and Vercel with minimal operating costs. There's no one I need to show quarterly metrics to.

This independence is what lets me keep it free. A project that doesn't need to generate ROI on outside capital doesn't need to push you into a paywall. The core is free today and I intend to keep it that way. If one day I add truly complex features (multiplayer coach mode, internal tournaments, something along those lines), there might be an optional paid plan, announced in advance.

I'm using ChessNotes every day for my own study. Actually using it, not for demos. When I find a bug, I fix it. When a feature is missing, I build it. I am user zero and that means the product will evolve toward what serious players need, not toward what maximizes an acquisition funnel.

The roadmap isn't a marketing doc. It's a list of things I want to build because I'll need them: full offline mode, collaborative drilling where two players quiz each other.

Above all that, the goal is to not lose simplicity. Every new feature must pass the test: do I really need it? Do I use it? Does it make the study experience better for those already here, or complicate it? If the answer is "maybe" or "it's cool," it stays out. Better a working essential suite than a broken Swiss Army knife.

If you're reading this page and thinking "this is exactly what I need," then it's for you. If you think "X is missing," write to me — an email, a message somewhere. That's how ChessNotes has grown so far: one person at a time telling me a real problem, and one feature at a time to solve it.