Sketchy by design
Wobbly borders, torn tape and paper grain baked right in. Your drafts look like drafts — because they are.
Ideas deserve rough edges.
Smudge is a sketchbook app for unfinished thinking — scribble, tape things down, cross stuff out. No gradients, no gloss, just honest progress.
~ yes, it's really supposed to look like this ~
What's in the tin
Three honest tools and one very forgiving eraser. Everything looks hand-made, because a human made it.
Tape everything down
Pin fragments, screenshots and half-thoughts onto one messy board. Nothing has to be finished to be useful.
Keep the ugly drafts
Every version stays, smudges included. Look back at where an idea came from, not just where it landed.
How it works
Three steps. Zero cleanup crew.
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Scribble
Open a page and make a mess. No templates, no onboarding parade.
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Smudge
Rearrange, tape over, cross out. Smudge never tidies up behind you.
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Ship it rough
Share the unfinished thing. Feedback lands on real work, not on polish.
Notes from the margin
I stopped agonizing over blank canvases. Smudge gives you permission to be bad on purpose — and somehow that's freeing.
Our best idea this year started as a taped-up napkin scan in here. Still ugly. Still shipped.
It feels like my desk, not like software. My zine layouts have never been this happily disorganized.
Pricing, scribbled on a receipt
Pick a plan. Cancel whenever. We'll only be a little sad.
Sketchbook
$0 / forever
- 1 messy board
- 20 taped cards
PDF exportVersion smudges
MOST POPULAR
Studio
$6 / month
- Unlimited boards
- Version smudges
- PDF & PNG export
- No watermark doodles
Print Shop
$14 / month
- Everything in Studio
- Shared team boards
- Shared tape & stickers
- Priority support (a human)
Questions, answered roughly
Yes. Every wobble, tape mark and coffee ring is on purpose. We think a tool should look like the messy process it holds, not like a magazine ad.
You can export honest ones: PNG and PDF of your pages exactly as drawn. We refuse to auto-smooth your lines — that's the whole point.
Nope. Dark mode is a charcoal sketchbook: chalk strokes, warm kraft tape, and pencil marks redrawn by hand for dark paper.
Nothing — and that's the feature. Smudge keeps every smudged version, so you can trace an idea back to its worst first attempt.
Yes — Print Shop includes shared boards and shared tape. Most teams take about a week to stop apologizing for rough drafts.
Go make a beautiful mess.
Get an invite to the free Sketchbook plan — no card, no pressure. We'll email you a slightly crooked welcome note.