A Therapist Notes App That Keeps Session Notes on Your Device

The list is short, and most consumer apps fail the first item.

• Notes stay on the device. Not “encrypted in transit”, not “encrypted at rest on our servers”. On the device, so there is no copy for anyone else to hold.
• No account. An account is a record of you, your email and your usage that outlives the app. A private notebook should not need one.
• A lock on each note and on the whole app, opened with a fingerprint or your face, that locks itself again when you step away from the desk.
• A way to keep quick process notes apart from the formal record, so the two never blur.
• Export you control. Plain files or an encrypted backup you can move without asking a vendor.
• Nothing trained on your text. If an app offers AI, it should run on your machine or not at all.

Apple Notes syncs to iCloud. A note you lock is end-to-end encrypted; everything else is readable by Apple unless you turn on Advanced Data Protection for the whole account. Most people never do.

Google Docs and Google Keep live on Google’s servers, tied to a Google account. They are built for sharing, which is the opposite of what a session note needs.

Notion stores every page on Notion’s servers and does not offer end-to-end encryption. Under its policies the company can access content, and its AI features work by reading it.

Your record system (an EHR or practice-management platform) is built for the clinical record: audit trails, retention, and, in the United States, a Business Associate Agreement. That is where the required record belongs. It is also a poor place for a half-formed thought between sessions, which is why so many of those thoughts end up in the apps above.

Dash is offline by default and has no account to create. Open it and write; the note is a file on your Mac or iPhone. Nothing leaves the device unless you decide it should.

• Lock any note. A locked note is encrypted with AES-256-GCM, with the key derived from your password by PBKDF2-SHA256 at 600,000 iterations. Open it with Touch ID on the Mac or Face ID on iPhone.
• Lock the whole app. Set a master password, let Dash lock itself after 1, 5, 15 or 30 minutes, or lock it instantly with Cmd+Shift+L when someone walks in.
• Duress password. A second password that opens a decoy set of notes rather than the real ones, for the day a device is demanded rather than lost.
• Self-destructing notes for the reminder you only need until the next session. Set a timer; the note deletes itself when it runs out.
• Open source. The whole app is published under the MIT licence, so the encryption is auditable rather than promised.
• Sync only if you ask. Dash Sync is an optional subscription. When it is on, every change is encrypted on your device before upload, and the relay stores ciphertext it cannot read. When it is off, Dash does not talk to a server at all.

Dash is a private notebook, not an electronic health record. Dash Notes is not a HIPAA business associate and does not sign Business Associate Agreements. Whether it suits any clinical record depends on your licensing board, your jurisdiction and your own risk assessment. Keep the records your regulator requires in a system built for that, and use Dash for the notes you want to keep to yourself.

In practice that means three things. Keep the record your regulator requires in the system built for it. Use Dash for what you keep to yourself: reflections between sessions, supervision preparation, reminders, reading notes. And check your board’s rules on where process notes may live before you move anything.

• One folder per client, named with initials or a code, never a full name in a folder or note title. Titles show in the sidebar; the body can be locked.
• Tags for themes (supervision, homework, referrals) so you can pull across clients without opening each folder.
• Lock anything identifying. Session notes get a password; a to-do list does not need one.
• Auto-lock at 5 minutes on the office Mac, instant lock before you leave the room, Face ID on the phone.
• An encrypted backup every week. Export a .dashpack file to a drive you control. It is encrypted with a password of your choosing and imports back into any Dash.

The Mac app is $14.99 once. The iPhone app is free on the App Store, and the web app is free too. The two stay in step with Dash Sync, an optional subscription at $4.99 a month or $47.99 a year with a seven-day trial; devices pair with a QR code and a short code, and the vault key never leaves them. Without sync, move notes between devices with an encrypted .dashpack export.