For students. Built one at a time.
Everything due. Nothing else.
Margin pulls every assignment from Canvas, Blackboard, D2L, Moodle, and your calendar onto one small screen on your desk. It doesn't do anything else.
Built, tested, and numbered by hand.
The real thing
Photographs of the first hand-built units, posted here as they come off the bench — no renders standing in for hardware.
It's one moment, repeated daily. Every other detail exists to support it.
You walk past your desk on the way out.
Lab Report 3, due in four hours.
You stay in. You write it.
From your browser to your desk.
Your school's class portal
Canvas Blackboard D2L · Brightspace Moodle Any calendarplus Paste any iCal share link — Apple, Google, Outlook, Proton, Notion — and the device reads it directly. It never touches Todoist.
If you already use Canvas, Blackboard, D2L, or Moodle, you're almost done. A small browser plugin on your laptop watches your school's class portal for new assignments and writes them straight into your Todoist as tasks, one project per course. Your device reads from Todoist on every refresh. No Margin server sits in the middle. We never see your task titles, because they never pass through anything we run.
Requires a free Todoist account. Why we picked Todoist →
One project per class. Color-coded by Todoist.
When the plugin sees a new course on your class portal, you point it at a Todoist project. From then on, every assignment from CS 225 lands in CS 225. Every problem set from PHYS 211 lands in PHYS 211. The colors and labels you set in Todoist follow them to the device.
Open Todoist on your phone, check things off there, and the device updates on the next refresh. Open it on the device, mark Lab Report 3 done, and Todoist updates. Edit anywhere. The other place catches up.
If you already have a project layout in Todoist that works for you, you keep it. Onboarding walks through mapping each course to whatever project you want. No auto-create, no surprises.
No feed. No scrolling. Just what's due.
An app on your phone is one swipe from everything else on your phone. You open it to see what's due. Twenty minutes later you're watching a video about lighthouse keepers. This isn't a discipline problem. It's a design problem.
A small, ambient dashboard. No algorithm. No AI. No feed. You walk past it. You see one red line, three task names, a date. You go back to whatever you were doing. The screen doesn't refresh while you watch. There's nothing else here.
That separation is the entire product.
Same week, different tones.
Five themes ship with the device. Cycle through them with one button.
Put your week on it.
Type a couple of real assignments. Watch them land on the screen the way they would on your desk.
Like what you see? Join the waitlist →
I'm a physics major at Illinois. I got tired of opening five tabs every morning to figure out what was due. Margin is what I built instead.
— Mitch, founder
Buying one for a student? Read this.
Many students wouldn't buy something like this themselves. They'd keep using a phone calendar, miss the lab report, and panic in the library at 1 AM. More often than not, it's a parent, grandparent, or sibling buying for someone. We built Margin for that, too.
It isn't another app or another subscription. It's a small dashboard that sits on a desk, quietly tells them what's due, and stays out of the way. No screen time added. No login they'll forget. No notification they'll learn to ignore. The longer note for gift-buyers →
Fifty pieces. Built by hand.
Fifty hand-assembled units, shipping summer 2027. The waitlist gets first pick of the numbered units, and the launch price locked in. Leave your email and we'll write when pre-orders open. No newsletter. No spam.
Is Margin right for you yet?
- Browser: Chrome or a Chromium browser (Edge, Brave, Arc) to run the setup plugin. Safari and Firefox come later.
- Tasks: a free Todoist account. Calendars work through any iCal link, whatever app you keep them in.
- Your school: Canvas, Blackboard Ultra, D2L Brightspace, or Moodle — and confirmed for your campus. Live now at UIUC; NIU in beta.
- Shipping: US & Canada first.
Not all four yet? Join the waitlist anyway — batch two widens the list, and we'll write when Margin fits. See the full school list →
Outside North America? Sign up anyway. We want to know how many to ship in batch two.
Expected $189. Final number set at our Kickstarter launch.
The parts run about $80. The rest is the work that keeps it running: the pipeline that pulls your assignments off your class portal into Todoist, a screen built for how students actually read a week, and us pushing the fix when your school changes Canvas — so it still works in April, not just the weekend you set it up. Why not just build one? →
By joining, you agree we can email you when pre-orders open. No newsletter, no third parties. Privacy policy →
Build log · May 2026 The guts work. There's no case yet. The whole pipeline runs end to end and all five themes render on the real panel — no enclosure yet.The road to batch one
- End-to-end pipeline working: assignments flow from the class portal into Todoist and onto the device
- All five themes rendering on the real e-paper panel
- A 3D-printed bezel and housing to live with TODO: confirm status
- Final enclosure & locked dimensions TODO: confirm
- Pre-orders open via Kickstarter, 2026 TODO: confirm window
- Batch one assembled by hand & shipped — summer 2027
USA & Canada to start