Take Note - Safeguard your notes with these 7 privacy-focused note-taking apps

In today's digitized world, privacy is a crucial aspect that should be taken into account. For note-taking, the use of privacy-focused, open-source, and end-to-end encrypted apps ensures that your confidential information remains safe from unauthorized access. According to a research conducted by DuckDuckGo, an increasing number of U.S. adults are taking privacy measures related to their online presences.

Standard note-taking apps may pose a risk to your privacy. Some of them store data on their servers, which is accessible by third-party entities. This information may be vulnerable to hackers or other malicious actors. Additionally, note-taking apps may not encrypt data in transit, making it susceptible to interception.

To ensure your notes are secure, it's important to use a privacy-focused note-taking app. Privacy-focused apps offer features such as end-to-end encryption, local storage, and zero-knowledge architecture, which helps protect your data. At ProductivePrivacy our goal is to highlight privacy-focused, open-source, and end-to-end encrypted productivity apps and inform users about their features, the workflows they give us access to, and why you should consider to a privacy-first alternative to the apps you are currently using. This blog post kicks off a series in which we will write about and highlight privacy-focused apps from different categories within the field of productivity, to give you an idea what alternatives are available out there. First, we will talk about note-taking apps that are designed to protect your privacy. We have researched and tested several apps to bring you a list of the best privacy-focused note-taking apps. These apps are great for students, professionals, or anyone who values their privacy. We will discuss features such as end-to-end encryption, zero-knowledge architecture, and storage options. Additionally, we will cover cross-platform compatibility, ease of use, and pricing. Read on to discover seven privacy-focused note-taking apps that you can use to safeguard your notes. The following seven apps are not the only ones who are focusing on privacy, they are a personal selection by ProductivePrivacy based on several aspects including but not limited to design, user experience, features, community, and workflows.

(https://spreadprivacy.com/people-taking-action-on-privacy/

Reflect is a rather new contender within the field of note-taking and PKM software, but because of end-to-end encryption, beautifully designed apps for mobile and desktop, various integrations, and simple and straightforward pricing, it quickly became a popular solution among users who are on the hunt for privacy-focused productivity apps. The team behind Reflect is an independent one scattered across the globe, seeking out to improve the way people think by making a jolly good note-taking app.

You do not even have to open Reflect to realise how much craft and love for detail went into designing it. Browsing and scrolling through its website alone is already a magical experience. As much as the features an app has to offer matter, if those features are badly designed and are lacking in terms of experience, it is questionable how much those features actually matter. There loads of apps that push forward releasing and shipping one new feature after the other. This often leads to overloaded apps, with no meaningful features, poor experiences, and ultimately

Some people might say that Reflect is not as feature-rich as other note-taking and PKM apps. But every single feature within Relfect is meaningful, designed beautifully, and offers a lovely experience. First of all, Reflect has been built and optimized for speed, so you can instantly sync your notes across devices. While PKM apps like Obsidian and Logseq became widely popular, they both have a certain kind of learning curve. With Reflect, you are good-to-go without the need of reading a documentation, watch countless videos of folks showcasing their note-taking systems, or spend hours figuring out how specific features work. Reflect offers an easy way to form a graph of ideas with backlinked notes. To make it easy to capture your ideas whenever they come to your head, Reflect is offering an iOS app to capture notes, ideas, and thoughts on the go, no matter if you are offline or online. Additionally, Reflect allows you to save snippets from your browser and Kindle. As your graph will grow over time, you need a frictionless way to find and recall what you have been writing down. Reflect offers a powerful and frictionless search to easily recall and index past notes and ideas. With the calendar integration, you can keep track of meetings and agendas right within Reflect, and see them in context with your ntoes. Thanks to end-to-end encryption you are the only one who can access your notes.

I am still a bit biased when it comes to the general topic of AI and the integration into note-taking, PKM, and productivity tools. The main reason for that is the fact that there are privacy concerns when the data I am inputing gets send to servers outside of the EU. Nevertheless, seeing LLMs like GPT-4 and Whisper from OpenAI within Reflect and experiencing the power it delivers is incredible. Reflect uses GPT-4 and Whisper to improve your writing, organize your thoughts, and act as your intellectual thought partner. AI within Reflect lets your transcribe voice notes with human-level accuracy, generate article outlines from scattered thoughts, list key takeaways and action items from your meeting notes, fix grammar, spelling, and improve your writing, and save your own custom prompts.

Reflect offers integrations for Readwise to sync your reading highlights and notes, for Google and Outlook to integrate your contacts and calendars, for Chrome and Safari to save web clips and sync with your Kindle, but you can also connect Reflect with dozens of applications without code by using the Zapier integration.

To get access to Reflect you need to sign up for one plan for one price. For $10 per month (billed annually) you get access to networked note-taking, a Chrome and Safari web clipper, Kindle offline sync, end-to-end encryption, Kindle highlights sync, and the iOS app. If you want to learn how to take great notes, Reflect offers a free online academy that gives you insights and helps you master the principles of note-taking. It is a lovely course and a no-frills guide to note-taking. You will learn about the principles of note-taking, daily journaling, linking your notes, and get insights on some real world examples. Reflect sets a high standard for simple, beautiful, and powerful software within the space of note-taking and personal knowledge management. You can give it a try by using the 14-day trial period. As of writing this, Reflect is available for macOS (both Intel and Apple Silicon), iOS and iPadOS (both in the form of TestFlight Apps), as well as Chrome and Safari extensions.

There is no doubt that Obsidian is one of the most popular note-taking and PKM apps out there. Markdown formatting, an open platform that allows developers to build their own plugins and customize the look of the interface, versatility, powerful linking features, and flexibility are a couple of reasons why Obsidian quickly became the go-to note-taking app for loads of people. The fact that Obsidian is open-source, based on local markdown files, and offering an encrypted sync, meaning it features a strong focus on privacy, might be the most important reason why people prefer Obsidian over other note-taking apps. Obsidian got started during the pandemic hit back in 2020, by Shida Li (better known as 'Licat' in the community) and Erica Xu (better known as 'Silver') during the pandemic after trying mutliple apps to build a personal knowledge base but not finding satisfaction. The team of two decided to build Obsidian on three fundamentals, which are 1) Local-first and plain text, 2) Link as first-class citizen, 3) Make it super extensible. Recently, long-time Obsidian user, contributer, community member, and creator of the Minimal Theme, Stehan Ango (better known as 'kepano') joined the Obsidian team as CEO.

In general, Obsidian is not the usual note-taking app. It is a powerful and extensible markdown editor that you can use to build your knowledge base on top of your local plain text files. No matter what operating system you are using, macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, or Android, Obsidian supports every single one. Nowadays, most note-taking apps feature some sort of linking and backlinking functionality. As you are taking notes consistently, you can create connections between them, and a tool like Obsidian gives you the possibility to visualize those connections through a so-called knowledge graph or graph view. The graph displays your knowledge at a glance. It lets you observe and explore your notes and the connections you have made. With additional features like grouping, filtering, and display options, you can customize and adjust how you are exploring your graph. Exploring your notes and your connections can help you discovering, developing, and evolving ideas. Ultimately, you should profit from taking notes consistently. Therefore, your note-taking and PKM tool should fuel your creativity and lead to fresh ideas. Besides the possibility to create backlinks, Obsidian obviously allows users to create and add outgoing links too, so you can see all existing and potential links from your notes. Both, backlinks and outgoing links of a note, are visible within Obsidian's right pane in the right sidebar.

What makes Obsidian so special is the fact that it is probably the most extensible note-taking app out there. No matter if you are a writer, content creator, designer, or developer, if you are serious about note-taking chances are high that you tried a variety of different note-taking apps. Obsidian is as close as a custom-built solution. Thanks to plugins, themes, and custom CSS support, you can tweak Obsidian to your needs and likings. Out of the box, Obsidian offers 25 core plugins. Since the Obsidian community is one of the strongest and biggest you will find within the field of note-taking and PKM, you are able to extent the app with over 950 community plugins and over 180 themes. With custom styling you can tweak Obsidian even more.

In the past, we experienced various apps shutting down, getting bought by bigger corporations, or changing their privacy policies multiple times. When you start taking notes and building up your knowledge base, the last you want is that your notes, thoughts, and ideas are stored in a proprietary format and that your data is locked-in. While several note-taking apps already support exporting your notes in various formats, which means you are able to move them somewhere else, if you want to, Obsidian takes the idea of future-proofing your notes to another level. With Obsidian, your notes and your data sit in a local folder. You choose where this folder is placed. You have full control over your notes. Since Obsidian uses Markdown, you are safe to move your notes somewhere else if that will ever become your plan. With Obsidian, all your notes live on your device. It is up to you how and if you encrypt them, and how and if you want to back them up. Since ultimately, Obsidian is a markdown-editor, that lets you write, create, and edit local markdown files, it is capable of working completely offline.

Obsidian has one of the (probably the) strongest communities that you can find in the field of note-taking, productivity, and PKM software. Obsidian's Discord community counts over 70,000 members, and there are more than 35,000 members that are part of Obsidian's forum. The community is open to anyone who is interested in Obsidian, note-taking, and knowledge management. What makes such a community that powerful is the fact that you are able to join a space of creative minds to learn together, create together, get help if needed, and share your insights. Obsidian is free-to-use, but you can (and should if you are using it) support the team and the development by buying either a Catalyst license (starting at $25 one-time payment with more tiers available), a Commercial license ($50 per user per year), or one of the add-on services, Sync ($8 per month, billed annually) and Publish ($8 per month per site, billed annually). As already mentioned, Obsidian is available for Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android. There is no doubt that Obsidian became one of the most popular apps within the field of note-taking and personal knowledge management. Its approach of providing versatility and an open platform, enables users to contribute to the tool itself by building and sharing plugins that enhance Obsidian's functionality and look. Additionally, Obsidian's encrypted sync and local storage of notes ensures your data is always secure. Whether you're a student, researcher, or knowledge worker, Obsidian is a privacy-focused note-taking app that can help you keep your notes safe and organized. So why not give it a try and see how it can improve your productivity and protect your privacy?

If you ever had the feeling that Notion isn't handling your privacy right, if you had security concerns in general, but you still wanted to use a tool like Notion to handle your notes and your projects, AppFlowy should be the next app to check out. AppFlowy is an open-source Notion alternative, that puts you in charge of your data and customizations. Exactly how it should be.

AppFlowy launched on GitHub in November 2021, which means it is still in an early stage. Nevertheless, since then the app made a huge leap, shipping exciting updates and features, gaining over 30,000 stars on GitHub, growing the AppFlowy community on GitHub and Discord to over 20,000 active members, getting selected for the Noteworthy Newcomer award as part of the Open Source Awards at GitHub Universe, and a lot more. With AppFlowy you get to experience a superb privacy-focused and open-source Notion alternative, packed with exciting features. You can build detailed lists of to-dos for different projects while tracking the status of each one. List elements within AppFlowy offer the versatility to you need to get things done, from work requests to housekeeping items. Additionally, AppFlowy lets you create Kanban Boards with ease. To ship projects faster, AppFlowy gives you the possibility to visualize items in a database moving through stages of a process, or grouped by a property. If you want to scope your projects better and visualize your data, AppFlowy's Kanban Boards are a great way to do so.

Since AppFlowy is open-source, individuals and teams can host it wherever they want, they're absolutely zero vendor lock-in. This means you always stay 100% in control of your data. On top of that, you can design and modify AppFlowy to your likings, thanks to an open core codebase. AppFlowy has been built with Flutter and Rust, which means it uses one codebase to support multiple platforms, it enables faster development, better native experience, and more reliable performance. But no worries, if you do not have any coding experience, AppFlowy enables you to create apps that suit your needs, since it has been built on a community-driven toolbox, including templates, plugins, themes, and more.

Workspace collaboration tools do not have to complex, and AppFlowy is the perfect example for it. Anyone is invited to contribute to the mission of democratizing the knowledge and wheels of making complex workplace collaboration tools. By joining the Discord Community or by engaging on GitHub, you can help to build a toolbox that empowers anyone to create their own system. To give AppFlowy a try, all you have to do is download and install it on your local machine. With AppFlowy, you always own and control your personal data.

A blog post about end-to-end encrypted and privacy-focused note-taking apps has to list Standard Notes, an app that helps you protecting your life's work with end-to-end encryption, advanced security, and unmatched privacy controls. For the last seven years, the team at Standard Notes has been committed to build an independent company, following the ethos of software sustainability and ethical data practices. Standard Notes's code is completely open-source and independently audited by leading security researchers. It is funded 100% by user subscriptions, no outside investment or VC money, and instead bootstrapped and independent.

Standard Notes's focus on privacy is unmatched. It provides a steel vault for your most sensitive data. It uses a 4x-audited industry-leading end-to-end encryption. This means only you have access to the keys required to decrypt your information. If you have ever been on the hunt for a note-taking app to safely store all your sensitive data in one place, access it from all your devices, and experience data-protection powered by the highest security standards, there is no way around Standard Notes. Standard Notes follows a simple approach: keeping your private information private. End-to-end encryption, independent audits, open-source codebase, no tracking or intrusive analytics, no third-party email services, and no IP address or user-agent collection turns Standard Notes into one of the most secure and privacy-focused note-taking apps out there. They openly state what user information gets collected and what services they use for daily operation.

Writing and taking notes within Standard Notes offers a flexible experience, powered by note types. At any stage of your note-taking process, Standard Notes does not force you to write every note using a simple toolbar. You are in control to choose what a note is and what it should do. No matter if you want to write rich text, markdown, spreadsheets, tasks and todos, passwords, or tokens, each note type within Standard Notes provides a distinct, purpose-built, and seamless editing experience. While other note-taking apps often come with boundaries, Standard Notes and its note type are an unmatched experience. All of this does not happen at the cost of privacy. Besides the mentioned encryption measures, Standard Notes provides its users with a long-term revision history that allows users to see revisions of their notes from the very beginning. In addition to that, Standard Notes delivers a copy of your entire text-based data set, in encrypted form, to their users' email inbox every single day. To secure your account even more, two-factor authentication adds an additional layer of security.

Once you commit to a note-taking app, you are storing and saving personal notes and information within that app. This means, your note-taking app becomes an intimitate space. To personalise and customise this space even more, Standard Notes offers you a variety of themes to choose from. With those themes you can change the appearance of your workspace to suit the time of day or desired creative atmosphere. Besides offering top-notch security layers, Standard notes also follows the mission to ensure that the app always feel simple, easy-to-use, and lightweight. By collaborating closely with their users, the team behind Standard Notes makes sure to build an app users absolutely love. Some folks might say, that the features of Standard Notes are limited, but that is by design to make sure to keep things simple and lightweight. Among the feature of Standard Notes you will find nested folders to structure and organise your notes, note pinning, archiving, and recovery, password protection of your notes, easy data import and export, authenticator that allows you to use Standard Notes both on desktop and mobile as a 2FA authenticator app, smart views that lets you build advanced. custom queries for viewing and organising your notes, and Listed which is a free blogging platform that gives Standard notes users a place to publish their words on the internet. You can use Standard Notes for free, forever, on every single device. The Standard Plan includes end-to-end encryption, unlimited device sync on web, desktop, and mobile, plain text notes, offline access, organising your notes into tags, password protection of individual notes, full data export in encrypted or plaintext format, two-factor authentication, daily encrypted email backups, and community support. The Productivity Plan will cost you $81 per year and includes everything in Standard plus writing end editing markdown and rich text, spreadsheets with advanced formulas and rich formatting, checklists and the ability to manage todos, access to Super note type, daily notebooks, using Standard Notes as your 2FA app, organising your notes into folders, web clipper, 1-year note revision history, account sign-in email notifications, 14-day 100% refund period, dedicated support. With the Professional Plan which will cost you $108 per year you get access to everything in Productivity plus 100GB encrypted cloud storage, subscription sharing with up to 5 accounts, no limit on file size, offline file access, backups of all your files stored locally, hardware security key support, and a lot more.

Besides Obsidian, Logseq is another super popular note-taking and PKM app, that grew massively over the last couple of years. No matter if you are a student, writer, project manager, designer, developer, or anything else, you are probably in the need to deal with and handle lots of information in your day-to-day working life. Nowadays, everyone is a knowledge worker. Therefore, everyone needs a toolbox to handle, keep track, transform, and process the amounts of information we get bombarded with every single day. Logseq delivers exactly that, an open toolbox for workflows that deal with lots of information, no matter if it is task management, PDF annotations, flashcards, daily journaling, literature notes, or whiteboards, Logseq offers it all.

With Logseq you get a superb companion that gives you the space to brain dump everything that comes to your mind. It will help you organizing your thoughts and ideas so that you can come up with new outputs more easily. At the core, Logseq uses the outliner approach of note-taking, which means every single note you take is a so-called node or bullet. You can easily indent and outdent those notes if you want to dive deeper into a previously collected thought or create dependencies. While doing that, you can capture, structure, and review all your notes with ease by using the linked references, queries, and search features. Additionally, if you want to organise your thoughts and ideas, and quickly turn them into outlines using block references, Logseq is a great tool to do that.

In the fast-moving world we are living in, we get bombarded with loads of information every single day. It is a tedious task to process all and make sense of it. With Logseq you have the tools and functionalities you need to turn this daily mess into structured information. Logseq is a great tool to stay on top of your relationships, conversations, and meetings. With the dedicated focus daily notes and journaling, Logseq helps you with channeling your attention, reducing your stress, and understanding yourself better. And all of this can be achieved without compromising your privacy. Logseq is the safe space for your thoughts, ideas, favorite quotes, reminders, and notes on books, articles, podcasts, meetings, and more. The fact that Logseq is open source, free forever for personal use, and based on Markdown files, ensures you that your notes are future-proof. Since Logseq follows a privacy-first approach, you can make sure that you own your data locally forever.

Thanks to over 150 plugins and over 30 themes, Logseq and its community offers you everything you need to extend the functionality and customize the look and feel of the app. Opening up the platform to developers and creative minds who have ideas on how to extend certain kind of features or customize the look of the app (e.g. there is a theme that resembles the looks of Arc, the popular browser by The Browser Company, so if you are a fan of Arc and you are using Logseq, make sure to check that one out) was one factor why Logseq became so popular among people from all kinds of backgrounds.

As of writing this, there are two long-awaited features that just entered into public beta. One of them is Logseq's own encrypted synching service. For those of you who do not know, since Logseq is based on local Markdown files, in order to sync your notes to your mobile devices you need to build your own solution. Within the Community Hub, Logseq recommended a video by Santi Younger, in which he describes how to use Syncthing to sync your notes to your iPhone and iPad. The Community Hub also includes a guide on how to sync to Logseq on Android using Google Drive or using Git and GitHub. To make it easier for users to sync notes from one device to another, Logseq has been working on their own encrypted syncing solution. Logseq's syncing feature is currently in beta. To get access to it, you have to be either a Sponsor or Backer of Logseq. Logseq is funding its development through Open Collective, a site that enables open-source companies like Logseq to set up a collective, raise funds, and manage them transparently. Besides the Logseq Sync Beta, Whiteboards have recently been opened up to all Logseq users. This new features gives you the possibility to place any of your thoughts from your knowledge base or new ones next to each other on an infinite canvas to connect, associate, and understand them in new ways. Visual-first, Whiteboard, and Infinite Canvas apps became incredible popular over the course of the last couple of months. Scrintal, Heptabase, Napkin, and others have followed the visual-first approach, giving users a new way of managing their knowledge, viewing their notes, and going from brainstorming to polished artifact quickly. Now, already established PKM apps, just like Logseq, shipped their own whiteboard and infinite canvas implementations. Great knowledge is a result of collaboration. Therefore, another exciting feature on Logseq's roadmap is real-time collaboration.

Logseq is available for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. This means, no matter which operating software you are using, Logseq gives you the possibility to start taking notes, creating connections, and making sense of them right away.

Anyone who has been searching through the web for an open-source and privacy-focused note-taking app to capture thoughts, ideas, notes, and securely access them from any device, will probably have stumbled across Joplin. Joplin is a free and open-source note-taking app that has been released in 2017, and which is available for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. Laurent Cozic, the founder of Joplin, started working on and developing the app in 2016. Since then, Joplin came a long way.

Joplin offers versatile ways of taking notes and gathering your thoughts. Additionally, it supports images, videos, PDFs, and audio files. But is does not end there. Joplin gives you the possibility to create math expressions and diagrams directly from the app. With its mobile app you can take photos and save them to a note of your choice. To customise your experience within Joplin, the app offers a variety of plugins, custom themes, and multiple text editors. This means within Joplin you are forced to use a markdown or rich text editor, since you decide what fits your workflows and note-taking processes better. Using the Extension API you can even create your owns scripts and plugins.

Loads of users who are on the hunt for a note-taking app that is available on all kind of platforms. The reasons for that are different ones. Some folks are using macOS at work and Windows at home or vice versa, they use an iPhone and an Android Tablet or again vice versa. This means, to make sure your notes are available on all the devices and platforms you use, you need cross-platform compatibility. Joplin allows you to access your notes from your computer, phone, or tablet by synchronizing them with various services, including Joplin Cloud, Dropbox, and OneDrive. Joplin is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS, and there is also terminal app available.

While using Joplin you can be sure that your notes are secure and that your data always stays yours. The app itself is open source and your notes are stored to an open format, which means you will have always access to them. By using end-to-end encryption, Joplin secure your notes and ensures no-one but yourself can access them. End-to-end encryption means that only the owner of the data can read it. With a system like that, you can prevent potential eavesdroppers, including telecom providers, internet providers, and even the developers of Joplin from being able to access the data. Joplin has been built upon a decentralized nature. This means, end-to-end encryption within Joplin needs to be enabled manually on every single device first, so you can sync it with all other remaining devices. By enabling the end-to-end encryption, Joplin will create a Master Key for encryption, which is secured by your password.

First of all, the following lines, as most opinions within this post, are personal preference, my perception, and subjective feelings. While Joplin ticks so many checkboxes when it comes to an app that does respect your privacy and secures your data, the only thing I do not like that much about the app is the UI and the overall design. Joplin has been in active development for some time, but it feels like the design did not receive the love it would have deserved, and that is something that is widely-spread within the open source software field. Do not get me wrong, there are open source software projects that feature a really nice design, but the majority of them do not align with what most people would call "modern design". Koos Looijesteijn wrote a great article with the title "Why is open source software so badly designed?" which fathoms this topic in detail and also delivers solutions what we can do about it. From what I am observing at Joplin's website, I assume there are efforts to align with modern design standards. But those efforts haven't reached the design of the user interface. Compared to the other tools within this post, Joplin just can not keep up when it comes to beautiful designed components and patterns. According to most recent news, Joplin does indeed work on improvements regarding the overall design and experience, although there is still a long way to go to keep up with modern design standards.

To support Joplin, the developer, and keep the lights on, you can either donate via PayPal, sponsor through GitHub, become a Patreon, donate via Liberpay, or direct bank transfer. While the development of Joplin mostly takes a lot of time, there are also running costs that need to be financed. Among those running costs, you find digital certificates, App Store fees, hosting, and more. Therefore, it is important to support the development of open source software if you find value in the app. The least thing you can do to support Joplin is to spread the word, rating the app on the App Store or Google PlayStore, vote for or review it on alternativeTo and Product Hunt, help Test pre-releases, or improving the Wikipedia article.

With the next app we are going to take a look at, the name speaks for itself: Simplenote is the simplest way to keep notes, sync them to all your devices, and stay organized. Simplenote is a product that gets developed by Automattic, the company that is responsible for WordPress, Tumblr, DayOne, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and other products. Since Simplenote is open source, you can find the source code for the iOS, Android, macOS, and Electron version on GitHub. Additionally, Simplenote is ready and open for contributions. While loads of note-taking and productivity apps go the route that introduces more and more feature over time instead on focusing on what their apps already have to offer and polishing it. Simplenote‘s feature-set is limited compared to other apps, but what it has to offer simply works and is a joy to use.

To structure and organize all your notes within Simplenote, you can add tags to them. Tags will also help you to find notes quickly with instant searching. All the notes that you take within Simplenote are powered by markdown, write, preview, and publish your notes fast and easy. As you are keeping adding more and more notes to Simplenote, you can be sure that your notes are safe. Since Simplenote backs up your notes with every change, you can see what you have noted last week or last month. Simplenote is not only a lovely tool that you can use as an individual, it also lets you work together by sharing a to-do list, post some instructions or publish your notes online.

One of the biggest advantages of Simplenote is the fact that you can download it on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux. This gives you the possibility to sync your notes to all your devices. Simplenote makes sure to keep them updated, automatically and in real time. There is no need to manually sync, it simply works. Besides all of that, Simplenote is free-to-use. All the apps, features, backups, syncing, and sharing is completely free. Nevertheless, in December 2022, Simplenote introduced the so-called „Simplenote Sustainer“ plan. The Simplenote Sustainer Plan is a completely optional paid tier, which means you can still use the app completely for free. But if you want to support the app, the developers, and help its continued maintenance, the Sustainer Plan is the ideal way to do so. The current Simplenote Sustainer plans are available for $19.99 per month or $199.99 per year. As of writing this, the Sustainer plans do not offer any additional features or benefits compared to what the free version is offering. In a blog post by Simplenote, they stated that there might be other special perks and benefits for subscribers.

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