About

In Mind42, "42" is not only the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. We pronounce Mind42 as Mind FOR TWO, and the whole word play is not only a reference to Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but indicates the collaborative character of mind mapping, and brain storming in general. And that's what Mind42 is. A collaborative browser-based online mind mapping tool.

Mind42 allows you to manage all your ideas, whether alone, twosome or working together with the whole world. Mind42 runs in your browser, so no installation necessary for the ultimate hassle-free mind mapping experience. Just open your browser and launch the application whenever and wherever needed.

About the company

Stefan Schuster, the creator of Mind42, is an IT freelancer and consultant based in Vienna, Austria. Mind42 originated as a project within the IRIAN Solutions GmbH, a software consultancy company focused on Java and Open Source, where he worked for seven years. After becoming a freelancer, Stefan took over Mind42 and keeps developing and maintaining it.

Why it's free

Well, honestly, that's kind of an accident. When starting Mind42 in 2007 within IRIAN, we had ambitious plans to build a flourshing empire of freemium web applications (free basic service and paid premium extras). But since it wasn't our core compentency, we never came to integrate any kind of payment. We just continued to develop, and never added any premium or paid content. So our users got used to all the available features. Pulling the plug and suddenly removing free features or limiting the number of mind maps just felt wrong. In the end we started to focus on advertisements to refinance the infrastructure and added the option to remove the ads for a payment for users who really couldn't live with them. At the moment I'm quite happy with the way it works out now, and don't plan to limit free users in any way.