I've been in meetings since 1996. I've taken notes in Word docs, in OneNote, in Evernote, in Notion, in Google Docs, in Otter.ai transcripts, and in a little paper notebook I still keep in my bag because sometimes writing is the only way I can listen. None of it ever stuck.
The reason isn't the format. It's that notes apps treat every meeting as a one-off. You wrote it down. You filed it somewhere. Whether anyone ever finds that note again, or whether any decision in it is actually honored, is on you.
meetingmind is the opposite of that. Every meeting produces three outputs: notes (for memory), decisions (first-class records), and action items (follow-throughs that carry forward until closed). Miss a meeting? The decisions from that meeting surface in the next one. Didn't finish an action item? It's at the top of next week's note automatically.
What's Different
Most meeting-notes tools are glorified markdown. meetingmind has three opinions:
- Decisions are not notes. They're their own entity type: what was decided, who decided, any dissents, effective date. You can search them across every meeting. "When did we settle on X?" → one query, five seconds.
- Action items carry forward. Unfinished items from meeting N-1 appear at the top of meeting N with the same owner. Re-reading last week's notes to remember what you promised? Gone.
- Follow-up reminders are automatic. Owner gets a nudge before the due date. If it goes stale, admin gets a heads-up. Not naggy, not noisy — calibrated.
The Schema
Three tables doing most of the work:
CREATE TABLE meeting (
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
title TEXT NOT NULL,
held_at TIMESTAMP NOT NULL,
attendees_json TEXT,
notes_md TEXT,
tags_csv TEXT
);
CREATE TABLE decision (
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
meeting_id INTEGER NOT NULL REFERENCES meeting(id),
statement TEXT NOT NULL,
decided_by TEXT,
dissents TEXT,
effective_date DATE,
supersedes_id INTEGER REFERENCES decision(id)
);
CREATE TABLE action_item (
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
meeting_id INTEGER NOT NULL,
description TEXT NOT NULL,
owner TEXT NOT NULL,
due_date DATE,
status TEXT NOT NULL, -- open / done / cancelled
closed_at TIMESTAMP,
closed_note TEXT
);Action items carry forward with a single SQL query at meeting-creation time: "give me all open action items where the owner is in this meeting's attendees." They get pre-loaded at the top of the new meeting's notes. No prompts, no opt-in, just there.
Full-Text Search
SQLite's FTS5 extension does the heavy lifting here. Every meeting's notes, every decision, every action item is indexed. The search page has a single box and three scope toggles (notes / decisions / actions). Results link straight to the source meeting.
I underestimated how valuable this was until I used it for a quarter. By week three I was hitting the search page multiple times a day to answer questions that would've otherwise been "let me dig through Notion."
The AI Piece
Optional. On the Hosted Pro tier (or BYOK on self-host), meetingmind can generate a post-meeting summary using our shared Claude wrapper. The summary identifies candidate decisions and candidate action items that you then review and accept into the structured tables.
The key word is candidate. The AI proposes; the human accepts. I don't want an AI auto-recording decisions that were only tentative. Been in enough meetings where "we should probably do X" gets logged by an overeager bot as a decision and then three weeks later someone's holding that against the team. The human-in-the-loop friction is a feature here, not a bug.
Pricing
- Self-host: $0. Full features except the managed AI summary (you can BYOK Anthropic if you want it).
- Hosted Pro: $15/mo. Managed, AI summaries, email reminders, Google Calendar integration.
- Team Plus: $49/mo. Multi-team accounts, shared decision log across teams, Slack reminder integration, SSO.
$15/mo is intentional — this is a tool for small teams, and a tool for small teams should be priceable by a line manager without a ticket to finance.
Who It's For
Engineering teams that actually have architecture discussions. Product orgs where the "what did we decide about pricing?" question comes up monthly. Non-profit boards. HOA committees (bear with me — some of the worst decision-drift I've seen is in volunteer governance bodies). Family partnerships running a small business where the decisions don't always get written down.
It's also good for individuals — I use it to track recurring 1:1s and to remember what I committed to in each one.
The amount of your life you spend re-litigating already-settled questions is an indictment of your notes infrastructure, not your team.
Related
meetingmind pairs well with coachboard (session notes with similar carry-forward semantics), churchadmin (committee meetings in small churches), and codesnips (different vertical, same "stop paying for the cloud version" energy).
Repo: github.com/Dangercorn-Enterprises/meetingmind. Self-host it for your team; email feedback.