TentanoteTry the export button on the last notes app you left. What comes out is usually less than what went in: a zip of files with the links broken, the tags flattened, the attachments renamed, the structure you spent a year building reduced to a folder. Sometimes there is no button at all, just a support article about why.
That is rarely an accident. When a company holds your notes on its servers, every note you add is a cost it carries, and the only way that cost is paid back is if you stay and, eventually, pay. So the free tier is a trial with a limit, the limit is set where it will pinch, and leaving is left hard. None of it needs anyone to be cynical. It is what the arithmetic of hosting other people's lives does to a product.
The graveyard of tools like this is full of lives people could not get back out. If you have been through it once, the first question you ask of the next tool is not what it can do. It is what happens to everything you put in it.
The shape that doesn't need a trap
Tentanote is a Mac app, and your workspace lives on your Mac. The app does its reading, sorting and connecting there, not on a server. Which means something that almost no software business gets to say: a free user costs nothing. No storage to pay for, no connection to keep open, no bandwidth.
That one fact changes what can be promised. A company whose free users cost it money has to squeeze them. A company whose free users cost it nothing can leave them alone. So the promises below are not generosity, which runs out. They are what the shape of the thing makes cheap, which is the only kind of promise worth taking from a company.
Four promises
- A file you can read. Your workspace is a file on your disk. You can open it, back it up with whatever you already use, and take it anywhere. It is not a cache of something that really lives somewhere else. It is the thing.
- Free on your Mac, without limits. Not a trial, not a cap on notes or spaces, not a feature held back until you pay. The Mac app is local and it is whole.
- Sync that can't read it. When you want your workspace on another device, that is the part that costs money, because it is a service someone has to run. It will carry your workspace encrypted with keys that stay on your devices, so the service cannot read what it carries. Not because of a policy that could change, but because it never has the means.
- Nothing lost if you stop. End a subscription and everything keeps working, in full, on your Mac. Nothing is deleted, locked or turned read-only. You lose sync, which is the thing you stopped paying for, and nothing else.
What the money is for
There is an honest question under all this: why pay for sync when the operating system gives some of it away? The answer is not that sync is being held hostage. It is that keeping your workspace in step across devices, without being able to read it, is an ongoing service that costs something to run, and that is the fair thing to charge for. What you are paying for is the service and a guarantee about custody. Not the right to keep your own notes.
Whether people will pay for a guarantee rather than a feature is an open question. The last decade suggests people say they care about owning their data and then buy on features anyway. It is still the right thing to build, and the right way to find out.
The test of a tool for your life is not what it does while you use it. It is what you still have after you stop.