Article
Your notes app is a landlord now
50 notes, one notebook, one device: how the biggest note apps turned free tiers into trials — and what to check before you entrust years of thinking to a landlord.
There was a time when a notes app was a box you put words in. Then the biggest one in the category started charging rent on the box.
Evernote's free tier now allows 50 notes, one notebook, and one connected device. Read that again: fifty notes. A serious user hits that in a month. This isn't a free tier — it's a trial with better PR. The Starter plan runs $99/year, Advanced $249.99/year. You're not paying for features at this point; you're paying ransom on your own archive.
How the lock-in works
It's never one thing. It's the slow accumulation of switching costs: years of notes in a proprietary format, notebooks organized just so, the search muscle memory, the web clipper full of saved articles. Migrating is technically possible and practically exhausting — which is exactly the calculation the pricing team made.
The device limit is the tell. One connected device on a free tier isn't a technical constraint; it's a deliberate annoyance, calibrated to be exactly as painful as the monthly fee is affordable. The note limit is the same move aimed at your archive: write enough to depend on it, then pay to keep writing.
The questions that matter
When you're choosing where to put years of thinking, the feature list matters less than the exit terms:
- Is there a note or notebook cap on the free tier? If yes, you're on a trial. Price the paid tier as the real price.
- Can you export everything as plain text or markdown? If export is awkward, limited, or paywalled, the app is a landlord.
- Does it need an account at all? A notes app that works without one can't hold your archive hostage — there's no server-side lock to pick.
- Is search local? Full-text search across your notes should not require a round trip to someone's data center.
The unglamorous ideal
The best notes app is boring: unlimited notes, markdown-ish formatting, instant local search, plain-text export, no account. Apple Notes is free and genuinely good if you live in Apple's world. Anything beyond that should be judged on the exit terms, not the feature tour.
Your notes are your thinking. Rent the apartment, don't buy the landlord's leverage over your own mind.
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