A note tool has three jobs

Note applications keep growing sideways: blocks, databases, shared boards, a view for every mood. For a great many people the actual requirement is far more modest — write quickly, keep what was written, and be able to walk away with it on the day you decide to leave. This project spends its effort on exactly those three, and almost nothing else. It is open source, encrypted end to end, has been running for more than ten years, publishes its code and has been through independent security audits. The interface is as plain as the promise: one input field, one column of notes.

The free tier is already respectable

The permanently free level is not a demo. It carries encryption, an unlimited number of devices, reading without a network, tags, a password on individual notes, a daily encrypted backup by mail and two-step verification. Those are the things people usually discover they need only after a laptop is stolen, and here they are on the level that costs nothing.

Ownership is written down rather than implied. Notes can be exported encrypted, and they can also be exported as plain text, so switching tools means carrying everything out in one movement instead of negotiating with a format. The two paid tiers add what amounts to better furniture: editors with a markup syntax, code highlighting, tables and equations, plus encrypted file storage. Useful, and clearly optional.

The habits that show up after ten years

The release rhythm says as much about the team as any feature list. The desktop version ships continuously, and the 3.202 line closed a path traversal hole in the plain-text backup and added search inside plain-text notes; each release carries a changelog clear enough to read. Official clients cover the three desktop systems and the web, sync runs over an encrypted channel, and the cryptography is open enough to be checked by anyone who wants to.

The current build is 3.202.5, which is a small number to represent a decade of work, and that is rather the point: nothing in the interface is trying to impress you. What it does not do is also worth stating. There are no databases, no boards, no graph view, and no shared canvas. Tags are placed by hand, and organisation is your job rather than the application's. Anyone who needs a second brain with a map of it should look elsewhere, and anyone who has been buried by such features will find the absence restful.

The test that matters

The honest question for a note tool is not what it can do this afternoon but whether the file will still open in a decade. Plain-text export answers that question in a way no feature can, because plain text does not depend on this company, this app store, or this decade's fashion in markup.

Who should not use it

One honest warning before the praise. If what appeals to you in a note app is building a system — linked pages, a knowledge graph, a dashboard assembled out of databases — this one will feel like a wall. The same holds for anyone who wants to draft long documents with outlines and citations inside their notes: the extended editors help, and they are still not a writing suite.

The other thing it will not do is decide where a note belongs. There is no automatic suggestion, no inbox that empties itself, no assistant offering to file things away. Tags are typed by hand, and the discipline of keeping that set small is what makes an archive usable three years later. That is a real cost, charged up front and stated plainly, which is more than most tools manage.

What ten years means here

Note applications have a habit of changing hands, changing direction, or quietly changing which export options they still support. The record here reads differently, and it is dull in the way that matters: release notes, security fixes, a version number that moves slowly and honestly. A tool that spends a decade on the same three jobs is not short of ambition; it is keeping a promise it is able to keep.

If flashy features have drowned you before, this is the reminder that a note tool's job is to keep the note. Encryption plus public code plus independent audits makes it the default answer for anyone with a reason to be careful, and plain-text export is the line that makes ten years a reasonable thing to promise.