What is Cowyo used for?

Cowyo is a minimal self-contained scratchpad wiki and pastebin in Go with real-time shared editing and optional browser-side encrypted private pages. It is a good fit for quick shared notes and snippets, and private encrypted scratch notes.

Is Cowyo open source?

Yes. Cowyo is open source. Its source code is on GitHub at schollz/cowyo and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. Cowyo is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.

Can I self-host Cowyo?

Yes. Cowyo can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Cowyo an alternative to?

Cowyo is an open-source alternative to Tot. Other open-source alternatives to Tot include Memos, Simplenote and Heynote.

Is Cowyo actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Cowyo was on 12 August 2026, and the latest release is v3.0.1, published on 2 August 2026. The project has 979 stars on GitHub.

Cowyo: open-source alternative to Tot

About Cowyo

Cowyo is a shared scratchpad for quick notes, described as a pastebin for minimalists. You open a page, start typing and it saves automatically, then share the URL so others can edit in real time. Visiting the root creates a page with a memorable alliterative name such as calm-cat.

While several people edit a page, each editor's caret appears as a dim gray line. For sensitive notes you can choose a private scratchpad, where the content is encrypted in the browser and the plaintext is never sent to the server. The README warns that lost key links cannot be recovered.

It is written in Go, uses SQLite by default and can use PostgreSQL via a database URL setting. Production options include a public site URL for canonical links and a sitemap, plus optional Umami analytics, AdSense and ads.txt settings. You can try it at cowyo.com or build and run it yourself on port 8001. No licence is declared in the repository metadata.

Key features

Auto-saving shared scratchpad pages
Real-time collaborative editing with carets
Private pages encrypted in the browser
Memorable generated page names
SQLite by default, PostgreSQL optional
Single Go application

Good fit for

→Quick shared notes and snippets
→Private encrypted scratch notes

Built with: Go
Tags: wiki; pastebin; notes; self-hosted; go; encryption; real-time; minimalist

Cowyo: questions and answers

What is Cowyo used for?: Cowyo is a minimal self-contained scratchpad wiki and pastebin in Go with real-time shared editing and optional browser-side encrypted private pages. It is a good fit for quick shared notes and snippets, and private encrypted scratch notes.
Is Cowyo open source?: Yes. Cowyo is open source. Its source code is on GitHub at schollz/cowyo and is written mainly in Go.
Is Cowyo free?: Yes. Cowyo is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.
Can I self-host Cowyo?: Yes. Cowyo can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Cowyo an alternative to?: Cowyo is an open-source alternative to Tot. Other open-source alternatives to Tot include Memos, Simplenote and Heynote.
Is Cowyo actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Cowyo was on 12 August 2026, and the latest release is v3.0.1, published on 2 August 2026. The project has 979 stars on GitHub.