Every tool a serious research team needs — and none of the ones it doesn't.
Designer, offline runner, sync engine, public links, Margin AI, insights and exports. Each piece is built to do one thing well; together they carry a study from first question to final dataset.
Build any instrument in a single canvas. Skip the spreadsheet schema dance.
Drag in field types from a palette. Edit labels in place. The inspector on the right surfaces the right properties for the field you've selected. No "form definition file" to learn.
- Ten field types out of the box — short text, long text, single + multi choice, Likert (3/4/5/7-point), numeric, date, GPS point, photo, audio.
- Auto-saved every keystroke. Versioned the moment you publish.
- Old responses stay tied to the version they were collected on — your data history is never rewritten.
- Skip logic with show-if rules and cohort-gated sections, built in.
Install once. Work for days without a signal. We won't lose anything.
The PWA is a real PWA — service worker caches the shell, IndexedDB stores responses locally, the recorder captures interviews even in airplane mode. Sync resumes the moment the connection comes back, media included.
- Foreground GPS, photo + camera, audio recording (WebM Opus).
- Per-record sync state visible to enumerator and supervisor.
- Pending media drains automatically when the connection returns.
- On the roadmap: a native Android app for heavy-field deployments.
Append-only, idempotent, auditable.
Every response carries a client-generated UUID. Re-uploading the same UUID is a no-op — your sync is safe to retry, replay, or batch. Server side, every state change is logged for audit.
- Bulk POST endpoint accepts up to 25 responses per request.
- Per-enumerator bearer tokens — never store passwords on field devices.
- Validation runs server-side against the locked instrument version. Bad records bounce back with a per-field error report.
- Photos and audio upload alongside responses, retried until accepted.
Marginalia, but the marginalia is intelligent.
Margin is named for marginalia — the scholarly tradition of notes in the margins of a text. She lives in the margin of your fieldnote, never replaces it. Brief, exact, and grounded in your actual data.
Summarise
Hand Margin a set of responses; get back a 2–4 sentence narrative with the themes and the response IDs it cited. No invented quotes.
Theme & code
Surface the recurring threads in open-text answers. Build a codebook collaboratively — Margin proposes, you confirm.
Draft & explain
Need an introduction paragraph, a methodology blurb, or a quick brief for a stakeholder? Margin drafts; you edit. Every claim is traceable.
I can't tell from these responses — you'd need to look at Q9 in the next cycle.
| ID | Region | Q4 | Sync |
|---|---|---|---|
| a1b9… | Greater Accra | 4 | OK |
| c3d7… | Ashanti | 3 | Pending |
| f5e2… | Northern | 2 | OK |
| b22a… | Volta | 5 | OK |
From raw rows to a readable story — without leaving the product.
Insights dashboards built automatically from your instrument — frequency bars for choices, distributions for Likert items, Margin summaries for open text. When you need to leave: export.
- CSV and JSON exports, tied to the instrument version they were collected on.
- Per-questionnaire insights dashboards composed automatically from your instrument.
- Sectioned response viewer — every answer type rendered the way it reads best.
- Conversational analysis via Margin — ask questions, get answers with citations.
Shipping in the open.
v0 is live. The next two releases are scoped and underway.
Shipped — v0
Designer, PWA + offline collection, sync engine, Margin AI, insights dashboards, activity log, role-based access, public response links, CSV exports.
On the roadmap — H2 2026
Map field types (polygon, line, track), audio transcription, map-based analysis view, more export formats, billing.
On the roadmap — late 2026
Native Android app for heavy-field deployments, multi-language instruments, advanced skip logic, institutional hosting arrangements.
Built for one specific outcome — research that ships.
Stop juggling. Pick a plan. Build your first instrument in twenty minutes.