Self-hosted · Open source · Yours

A mind vast enough to hold the day.

Sempa is a calm task manager you run yourself. Plan each day with intention, hold your focus, and close the evening cleanly — with your email and calendar quietly pulled in. No lock-in, no ads, no one watching.

Local-first  Runs fully offline · ~10 MB image · AGPL-3.0 licensed

The name

སེམས་དཔའ་ཆེན་པོ

Sempa Chenpo · Sanskrit: Mahāsattva

Great Being. Great Hero.

Sem
སེམས་

Mind, or consciousness — the awareness you meet the day with.

Pa
དཔའ་

A hero, a warrior, a brave one. The courage to stay present.

Chenpo
ཆེན་པོ་

Great, vast, big enough to hold what arrives without strain.

In Tibetan Buddhism, a sempa chenpo is a mind vast and courageous enough to hold the suffering of all beings — without being overwhelmed by it. Not a mind that does more, but one with room enough for everything that comes.

“A mind big enough to hold the day — without being overwhelmed by it.”

That is the whole idea behind the app. Sempa holds your tasks, your email, your calendar and your reminders, so your mind doesn't have to keep them all in the air. It's built for spaciousness, not pressure — plan with intention, focus without noise, and end each day knowing it's been set down.

A calm system

Everything in its place,
nothing shouting for attention.

Four quiet rituals carry your day — and the small pieces that make them up are designed to disappear into the work.

Plan the day

A guided morning ritual and a seven-day board you drag tasks across. Set the handful of outcomes that matter.

Hold your focus

Time-box work into the schedule, then enter Focus mode with a built-in Pomodoro that logs real time against your estimate.

Close the evening

A shutdown ritual to tick off wins, reschedule what's left, and reflect — so the day is genuinely set down.

Pulled in for you

Star an email and it becomes a task. See calendar events beside your plan. Sync assigned Jira issues. All optional.

Review the MBR deck
9:00 · 45m deep work
Focus · in progress
18:24
Design sync
11:00 – 11:30 · Calendar
All changes synced
Make it yours

Six themes. One calm.

Choose a palette that suits you — each one restyles the whole interface in light and dark, all carefully kept refined and quiet. Try them right here: the button below re-skins this entire site.

Your data stays yours

Self-hosted by design. No cloud to trust.

Each person runs their own copy — like Gitea or Vaultwarden. Your tasks, notes and reflections live in a single SQLite file on your own server, never on someone else's.

  • Runs fully offline once configured — external services are optional.
  • Local-first apps keep working with no connection and sync when you're back.
  • Tiny footprint — a ~10 MB image using ~20 MB of RAM. No separate database.
  • Open source — AGPL-3.0 licensed; audit it, fork it, trust it.
Stand-up in 10 minutes
Reminder · fires on-device, even offline
Mark doneSnooze 1h
Today5 of 7 done
Reach it from anywhere

Private by default, with Tailscale.

Pair Sempa with Tailscale and your devices form a private mesh. Your phone and laptop reach your server from anywhere — coffee shop, office, mobile data — with nothing exposed to the public internet.

  • No port forwarding and no open ports to the world.
  • Automatic HTTPS via MagicDNS — real certificates, zero config.
  • Zero-trust — only the devices on your tailnet can connect.
Set up with Tailscale →
Laptop
Phone
Your tailnet · encrypted
Your Sempa server
sempa.tail1234.ts.net
Always in reach

Your day, a glance away.

Keep today in view without opening the app. A floating desktop widget sits quietly above your work, and Android home-screen widgets come in three sizes — so the next thing is always one glance away.

  • Floating desktop widget — a small always-on-top window of today's tasks
  • Android widgets — 2×2 progress · 4×2 task list · 4×4 week summary
  • Tap to complete — tick tasks off right from your home screen
Today2/4
Review MBR deck
Draft launch notes
Sync with design
2
done today
2 remaining

Run your own Sempa in about two minutes.

Docker for the server, native apps for Windows and Android, a PWA for everything else. Clone, run the installer, answer a few questions.

Free, and freeing

Sempa is open source and always will be.

The app is free and open source, and self-hosting it will always be free. There are no ads and nothing to upsell. If it earns a place in your day, a small gift helps keep it maintained and the new clients coming.