I settled on UpNote a few months back, but recently went through a few weeks using Notion (and also trialling Obsidian.) I believe I am coming back to UpNote, for me it seems the best unique combination of features, interface, and pricing:

- Good links/backlinks implementation (my main organizational method now)
- Tags, folders, stars, pins as secondary organizational tools
- Very responsive software with local storage (faster/snappier than Notion and Craft), reliable synchronization, good import/export
- Attractive, elegant interface (this is where Obsidian really falls down for me)
- WYSIWYG (maybe a given in this forum, but I had been trying out Obsidian...)
- Mac/iOS/Android/Windows (I only really need Mac and iOS)
- Tables
- Affordable lifetime license

The one major feature I am personally missing right now is ability to collapse/expand (it does have TOC feature which helps a lot here.)
The way collapse/expand is currently implemented in Obsidian (by heading) would be fine for me.

I was pretty happy with Notion and love its versatility, but really wish it used local storage. I don't know that the company can easily implement this, as its apps are basically just web browser windows and a lot of Notion's functionality seems server based. For team work I think it would be excellent.


WSP wrote:

Oops. I just found the answer to my own naive question. Simply clicking
twice (in Windows, anyway) on a note title in the left-hand column opens
the note in a separate little window, and I see that I can have several
notes open simultaneously.

This confirms my general impression of UpNote: it is an exceptionally
powerful little app, but sometimes you have to poke around a bit to
discover its potential.

satis wrote:

It's continuing to improve, but for me it's only became usable this past
week when they *finally* added the ability to search within notes.

Right- a very important feature.

I bought it and I look forward to its continued improvements, but with
the still-unlimited cloud storage they're promising for the app I remain
very wary of depending on it because there's no way that offer is
sustainable with a cheap one-time app purchase.

The most viable solution would seem to be to cap storage and/or offer additional tiers for larger storage capacity. But this should have been done from the get-go, rather than retrofitting storage limits after customers have bought lifetime licenses. Even if they don't anticipate any issues for 99% of user accounts, it's probably better to slap on some high arbitrary storage limit just in case.

I have a lifetime license and it won't bother me if/when the day comes where they have to implement storage limits. It could be problematic and bad from PR perspective, but I imagine they would do that before sinking the company because some customers are using way too much storage/bandwidth.

The Markdown export seems very good, so at least our data should be portable if they ever close up shop.

I wrote to Upnote customer Support asking more info about the viability of the project, mentioning such a cheap one time fee for the app and i´ve got this answer from Thomas:

-----


Hi Rafael,

Thanks for writing to us and we really appreciate that you like and support UpNote :)

Our team is from Vietnam and our plan is to develop UpNote into a fully featured notes app which is intuitive and easy to use on all platforms. We have been developing UpNote for 4 years and have integrated many of our users' feedback to make UpNote more pleasant to use.

We want to make the lifetime license affordable so that the app can be widely used and enjoyed by our users. We believe that as long as we receive support from users we will be able to sustain the business for long. If you know any friends who may enjoy UpNote, please help us spread the words :)

We believe that as long as we receive support from users
we will be able to sustain the business for long.

Continuing storage costs (not to mention ongoing dev salaries, rents, and rewarding investors) simply do not scale with individual $20 one-time payments, no matter what representatives say.

The closest analogue might be IA writer, which is $30 for iOS and $30 for macOS, but they don't offer any cloud storage, let alone Upnote's claim of *unlimited* cloud storage for all users.

Although I bought Upnote in May and it's finally become a useful alternative to Apple Notes (albeit without much of an advantage over it) I have no confidence whatsoever in the dev's ability to continue to offer the current plan with this low one-time price. They will either need to restrict cloud storage (or charge for it beyond a certain point, or offload cloud storage to a user's choice of pay-cloud), change to a subscription model (like virtually every other writing, notetaking or task management app with proprietary cloud), or are aiming to sell the product to a larger company... who will make one of the above choices.

In theory, I agree. In practice, the concept of “unlimited” storage is purely theoretical.

I suspect this offer is based on an actuarial calculation: most people won’t use more than a fairly predictable range of storage volumes. A few might use vast amounts of storage. A very large number (probably the majority) of users won’t use much storage at all. Plus: I have no idea what storage costs in Vietnam, but I’m assuming that’s something a sensible actuarial calculation would also factor in.

The outcome is a positive one, however: UpNote is a very reasonably priced, super-cross-platform app that’s in constant and ongoing development.

satis wrote:

We believe that as long as we receive support from users
> we will be able to sustain the business for long.

Continuing storage costs (not to mention ongoing dev salaries, rents,
and rewarding investors) simply do not scale with individual $20
one-time payments, no matter what representatives say.

The closest analogue might be IA writer, which is $30 for iOS and $30
for macOS, but they don't offer any cloud storage, let alone Upnote's
claim of *unlimited* cloud storage for all users.

Although I bought Upnote in May and it's finally become a useful
alternative to Apple Notes (albeit without much of an advantage over it)
I have no confidence whatsoever in the dev's ability to continue to
offer the current plan with this low one-time price. They will either
need to restrict cloud storage (or charge for it beyond a certain point,
or offload cloud storage to a user's choice of pay-cloud), change to a
subscription model (like virtually every other writing, notetaking or
task management app with proprietary cloud), or are aiming to sell the
product to a larger company... who will make one of the above choices.

MadaboutDana wrote:

In theory, I agree. In practice, the concept of “unlimited”
storage is purely theoretical.

Except it's a tacit contract with users, and not theoretical. Countless apps from small cloud services to large (eg Google Photos) offered free unlimited storage... but then pulled the rug from users. (Or at the very least data-scraped user data and sold info to advertisers, a la Edison Mail.)

I suspect this offer is based on an actuarial calculation: most people
won’t use more than a fairly predictable range of storage volumes.
A few might use vast amounts of storage. A very large number (probably
the majority) of users won’t use much storage at all. Plus: I have
no idea what storage costs in Vietnam, but I’m assuming
that’s something a sensible actuarial calculation would also
factor in.

Vietnamese data storage isn't vastly cheaper, if it's cheaper at all, than any other location for extensible cloud storage and support. A sensible assumption is considering them just following the huge number of VC-backed startups in the last decade who sacrificed profits to grow a userbase, then flipped the company (usually not successfully), or changed the ToS on users.

The tiniest, most parsimonious ongoing companies with significant cloud data costs all charge subscriptions for unlimited file storage. If the company believes what it's saying it's not being rational. (I'm reminded of the joke: we lose money on every user but we make it up in volume.) I think they are rational, but not candid.

Thank you for your interest in our viability with current unlimited storage.

We do not store any data in Vietnam. We're using Firebase to store all of our users' data in a US server, and at this point the costs are still within manageable range. We actively monitor user usage and continuously optimize the app to use less resources from the server. What Bill said is indeed true, the majority of our users don't use that much space and luckily Firebase also offers a reasonable cost to store user files and attachments :)

UpNote is an indie project (it was started as a side project and the app's earnings have allowed us to work on it full time recently). We have no intention of selling UpNote to a larger company. Although small, our team is passionate about creating useful software for our users and developing UpNote steadily.

Again, thank you for all your support so far. Without the support of our early adopters, we wouldn't have made it this far :)

Thomas

Having said that, we are aware that the lifetime offer might not last and we may need to switch to all subscription at some point in the future. However the new pricing structure will only be applied to new users and won't affect past and existing lifetime users.




Thomas wrote:

Thank you for your interest in our viability with current unlimited
storage.

We do not store any data in Vietnam. We're using Firebase to store all
of our users' data in a US server, and at this point the costs are still
within manageable range. We actively monitor user usage and continuously
optimize the app to use less resources from the server. What Bill said
is indeed true, the majority of our users don't use that much space and
luckily Firebase also offers a reasonable cost to store user files and
attachments :)

UpNote is an indie project (it was started as a side project and the
app's earnings have allowed us to work on it full time recently). We
have no intention of selling UpNote to a larger company. Although small,
our team is passionate about creating useful software for our users and
developing UpNote steadily.

Again, thank you for all your support so far. Without the support of our
early adopters, we wouldn't have made it this far :)

Thomas

Is there any way to download the Windows version without using the Microsoft store?

Hi Geoffrey

We plan to work on a portable version of UpNote for Windows soon :)

Geoffrey Miller wrote:

Is there any way to download the Windows version without using the
Microsoft store?

This is just to report that I continue to experiment with UpNote and am still very impressed by it. I find it extremely useful and reliable.

From my point of view, the most serious shortcomings are the inability to share files with others and the lack of OCR in images. But aside from that, it's an exceptionally well-designed app. I'm surprised it's not more widely used.

Bill

Hi all,

UpNote is pleasantly streamlined. Very easy to use (only sometimes it's not intuitively clear for me). With auto save, versions, backup it’s a no-brainer, you just type.
But when it comes to cross-device editing you have to switch your brains on ;-) It’s not made for concurrent editing. That’s fine since it’s meant for a single user. But text may just disappear if you don’t take care!

Especially with a laptop you are often offline (e.g. on an airplane).
You have to sync (go online) before you can continue working on the same notes with another device.
Not syncing can easily happen by accident (e.g. in the queue at the airport, pulling out your phone, trying to add something you just missed on the laptop on the plane - all still offline).
Even if yout try, making sure to be online (reliably) is not as easy as it seems (airport, hotel, abroad).

To be able to better manage these situations, I would like to
a) have an indicator that shows the sync status (e.g. dirty flag).
b) be warned when I trigger manual sync and the device is offline.
On Windows a) works. On Android it does not. When I swipe down over the notes list, I see the sync icon/animation, but there is no warning. Did I miss something?

For me it’s like working with two text editors on the same file. That’s ok. Brains switched on ;-)
But a standard text editor at least shows that the file a) was not saved and b) warns when saving fails.

Is this an issue for you? How do you work with UpNote in this regard?
For me, it's quite a nightmare when I can't rely on the tool to keep what I just deleted from my memory, when I have a hard time recovering it and don't know for sure what I lost...

Thanks for your comments,
Zweikeks