The road to v1.1

Two weeks after launch, v1.1 lands the changes most-requested by early customers: a refreshed pricing ladder anchored by a $1 trial, audio file uploads, browser-tab capture via a Chrome and Edge extension, a real To-Do dashboard, two new languages, a Cornell-style Study Note template, pause and resume on every device, and a meaningfully faster mobile experience.

The official launch. After four weeks of building, shipping, and refining, Loka stepped out of private preview and opened to every team that wants their meetings to do more than fill a calendar. v1.0 was the product we'd been telling ourselves about since the first commit, fast, mobile-ready, and honest about what AI can and cannot do for a conversation.

The final days before launch were spent rewriting the pricing catalog to support annual plans, enforcing a mandatory payment gate, and significantly upgrading landing page performance and SEO.

The last release before launch is the one where all the thousand small things get fixed. Safe areas, keyboard handling, iOS audio quirks, viewport math, the stuff that makes a web app feel inevitable on a phone instead of feeling like a desktop product in drag.

Two weeks out from launch, we turned our attention to the quieter parts of a SaaS product: how fast the landing page feels on a cold first visit, how we reach users between their meetings, and how we keep their data out of the wrong hands.

Real commerce meets real organization. This release introduced the pricing system that will power v1.0, the payment integration behind it, and the folder hierarchy users needed long before they admitted it.

Growing interest forced us to think about cost and capture at the same time, which produced the public waitlist landing page and an admin-controlled batching mode that trades a little latency for a dramatically lower transcription bill.

The product had been shipping under a placeholder name. This release cemented the brand we'll carry into launch, Loka, at lokanote.com, and tightened the transcription models underneath at the same time.

A four-batch audit pass through the entire product, pipeline correctness, API ownership, UI robustness, and UX polish, each surfaced a list of small sharp edges that we spent the day rounding off.

The biggest architectural shift of the build. We dropped the meeting-bot model entirely and replaced it with direct in-browser recording, real-time transcription, and a conversational AI panel that turns every meeting into a queryable document. This is where Loka started to feel like its own product.

The first version that felt like a product. Meetings were uploaded, transcribed, and returned as structured summaries, the first cut of the end-to-end loop our users still rely on today.

The foundation. A modern full-stack web architecture with per-user row-level security wired through every table from the first migration. Everything else was built on top of this.