This seems the remark of someone who has never created a delightful software app, who has never written help files or user manuals, who has never maintained a well-designed website, who has never interacted with users in all their sheer cussedness. I don’t know how the NotePlan developer does it all. Twitter, Discord, reddit, Mac Power Users forum. All while regularly and significantly improving his offering.
I love it. That gave me a good chuckle. Because you cared enough to make 13 posts in this thread. But as others have said many times, it is up to you how you spend your money.
Yes, there is nothing wrong with conversing a lot in this thread, whether using Noteplan or not.
Also had to smile at this. 
Somehow there are always only a few developers in the world who manage to publish software that closely fit individual thinking and working styles.
I have used NotePlan off and on for the past 2 years. I really want to love the software, but I just like it. I think that’s the rub with the price increase. If I loved it, then I would be more than happy to pay the increase (even though that’s not even on the table for existing users). And, as has been stated, that seems to be the rub for a lot of people…
I feel like NotePlan falls into a particular category of power users like OmniFocus does with their automations. There is a LOT of power under the hood, but it’s not easily accessible. It requires lots of time and effort on the user’s part to unlock all that potential. You spend hours fiddling with things to get it just right, and then something will stop working and you’re spending more time trying to figure out what changed. Or you run into something that doesn’t work the way you expect, so you try to spend some time tweaking it, and ultimately find out it’s just not possible to do, or you’ll have to write some plugin code to handle it.
The bottom line is that (for me) I just need a list of things to do and be able to schedule them with some minor categorizations (lists or tags) and NotePlan causes me to waste a lot of time fiddling in the same way that OF does. Could I just use NotePlan as is? Yes. But then what’s the point of just using it like a regular task list when Reminders, MS Todo, Todoist, etc… exists? The reason for it existing is for the power user features.
Also I think Eduard (developer) is dealing with backlash from either a poorly timed “announcement”, or just a bad coincidence, or a bit of both. We are in a world that is inundated with inflation right now. Every time I go to the store or buy something online the cost has increased. Often times by large percentages. I’m finding myself trying to cut back in every area I can. I find myself continually asking, do I need that item if something else I already own accomplishes it? With a price increase of 50% 100% in the current market, I’m sure he’s running into a lot of people feeling this way. Thus the push back. Even though I know that current users aren’t immediately affected. It gives rise to the mindset of a cost increase in yet another area.
But the bottom line (which we won’t know for months) is did this do as @ryanjamurphy suggests and give him more dedicated users who are more passionate about NotePlan and thus reduces his support overhead, and allows him to focus on the core features they need? Or does it cause his sales to plummet and he ends up making less money than he would’ve with the same level of support? Only he can answer that question, and really it all depends on what he wants to accomplish with NotePlan.
It seems like he wants to focus the product into the niche category and really dive deep into a small community of users. As the owner/developer that’s totally his prerogative, but it means that there won’t be much wiggle room for light users. The only people using his app will be the super devoted loyalists.
Anyway, do I personally think the price increase is a mistake? For users like me, yes, but I think he will end up being fine. He’s dedicated, and he seems willing to go backward on the price if it doesn’t work out. 
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He should have kept the price of subscription the same and added a Tip jar for those die hard loyalists. He would have not had this pricing lashout.
It may seem like it but it isn’t. With the exception of developing app software, I‘ve tried my hand at such things. To (admittedly) varying degrees of success.
The developers have obviously worked hard on Noteplan. But I do believe that the difficulty and complexity from a development point of view is lower than, say, for developing an OCR engine, „full-featured“ word processing or image editing app. But you don need to be a genius programmer to create a reasonably competitive product.
You’re not going to rival Microsoft or Adobe as a small indie developer. But you have a good shot at Noteplan. If, of course, you’re willing to put in the work. And that‘s evidenced by the plethora of note-taking apps from indie developers. It’s a market and a product that’s assailable.
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Noting that it’s not 50% - it’s 100%.
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It seems to me that very few people here are his target market. Yes, we’re all power users of one sort or another, but as someone said – how many people in this thread actually use NotePlan or were seriously considering it immediately before the price increase? Not many.
I do use NotePlan. I like it a lot. I’m also impressed by Eduard’s ability to keep improving the app at a remarkable clip, stay in touch with not only users but also plug-in developers, and produce good documentation and how-to articles and videos. I sometimes wonder whether he sleeps.
Mind you, I’m not trying to convince anyone to use it, or to consider his pricing strategy good or bad. I just don’t know that the (dismissive or supportive) comments on this forum are indicative of anything more than how some of the more vocal people on the forum feel.
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Me. I was using it before, I really liked it, and then I actually lost track of tasks because the software didn’t work as expected. I was planning to pop back and give it a shot. But I like doing monthly subs, and $15 / month is…insane.
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Me I guess. I’ve just finished my first full week trialling the software, and I love it. It just seems perfectly designed for the way I like to work (a novel idea - a task manager that fits my style rather than trying to force my process into a system that doesn’t suit me!).
The NotePlan trial is a month long so I’m not a paying customer yet, but if my trial continues to be this successful I will have to make a decision about buying it. It’s hard for me to reconcile that I think Adobe subscriptions are daylight robbery, but that I’d willingly pay more for an app that does less. Although, supporting “small business” and paying fairly for what I think is excellent work is a consideration for me (but I’m not a developer and don’t know how to assign a value to that kind of work anyway! Maybe all apps are just underpriced and I’m not aware!). I don’t know where my “pain price point” is but I think NotePlan crossed it. I didn’t question buying a year’s sync from Obsidian ($10/month), but the NotePlan price point makes me wince a little.
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This is come up a few times in the thread. It seems that there’s two main consumer perspectives on price:
- What should an app like this be charging?
- What are these use cases/workflows worth to me?
There’s a paradox here.
It’s pretty easy to critique a notes app by saying, “How could this be worth X dollars?”, especially when comparing it to “professional” software like Adobe’s suite. Clearly, while NotePlan is nice, it is nowhere near as involved or as developed as something like Photoshop. So how can the price be comparable?
At the same time, it’s easy to see how valuable a good notetaking workflow is to most of us. Unless you’re a graphic designer, you probably don’t need all of Photoshop’s capabilities and could make do with many other cheaper options. Meanwhile, while anyone could take notes in TextEdit, it is obvious that more advanced features would be incredibly useful if you are spending a lot of time working with your notes in a given day.
Clearly both of these perspectives are incomplete. They are curious, though, because they matter a great deal to us… even though we know they’re incomplete!
The psychology of consumer app purchases is a weird thing indeed.
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I think you’re missing one - “what’s the migration cost in/out of this app, and how likely is that to be necessary?”
The first condition applies here as well. Photoshop is Photoshop at least partially because everybody makes extensions, brushes, etc. for it. It’s the 800-pound gorilla. When other software starts advertising that it’s compatible with Photoshop files, extensions, etc. you’re the market leader. Cost of switching from Photoshop? Probably higher than just paying a sub, if you’re even remotely a power user.
Same for NotePlan. The thing about notetaking software is that yes, it’s incredibly valuable. And if it were just some random text bits and a search system, switching apps would be a non-issue.
But at this point, anybody that’s in NotePlan’s target market is going to be building an elaborate system on top of NotePlan’s features that won’t migrate. And at that point, you start raising lock-in concerns.
Lock-in is a non-issue if you generally trust the dev to be around and not be weird about pricing - but that’s where NotePlan is breaking down for me, and (I think) some of the others on this thread.
NotePlan’s dev has effectively doubled prices twice in two years. So if I’m going to put my entire PKM and task system in NotePlan, and become reliant on those features, that will increase my future switching cost substantially. And the longer I use it, the more I’ll be dependent on it.
Projected massive price volatility for something that’s essential to your life is a Very Good Reason to be looking for an alternative. And that’s where I’m finding myself.
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I disagree. I use NotePlan heavily, but I’m being very careful to make sure I use it in ways that I can migrate. It doesn’t take much effort, and only one trade off that I can think of.
I’m not relying on [[note#heading links]]. NotePlan’s synced lines implementation actually is portable, to my surprise – it literally copies the line to multiple places, appended with a ^unique_identifier in plain text (but hidden in NP) to track subsequent changes and mirror them in all the line’s “locations”; if I open the note in another app, the lines are all in the right places, tho they won’t sync outside NotePlan.
I can’t think of a lot of NP-specific syntax beyond that, though I may be overlooking something. It helps that NotePlan has a great custom-syntax system; I’ve set up themes to recognize highlight and strikethrough syntax from other apps, to improve cross-app portability.
Plugins and some automations may be NP specific. But that’s true of my Keybord Maestro and Hammerspoon macros, Shortcuts, etc. as well.
None of which speaks to whether you see NotePlan as a good value. That’s up to you. But in my experience, I don’t think it suffers the kind of lock-in that, say, Obsidian data-view can.
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Same here really. I use the note takers in DEVONthink 3 a lot now and find them sufficient.
I agree that it would not take much for me to move out of NotePlan and go back to using a folder of Markdown documents with the Byword editor. But it would not be the same. Not even close. I would be very sad to give up NotePlan. And right now I have no intention of doing that. 
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Likewise. I take a little effort to keep things portable not because I expect to leave NotePlan (though you never know), but because I like using multiple apps alongside one another.
Obsidian has a great Kanban plug-in and is great at rendering mermaid.js diagrams. nvUltra (in beta) is lightning fast. The Archive is a good solid alternative of something goes sideways. And of course, there’s always BBEdit and vi when I need them. Oh, and mdless is great on the command line too.
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I wondered about this app the other day, did a little Google searching, and there it was, STILL IN BETA!
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(90s hip-hop beat plays in the background) Ain’t no beta like a Terpstra beta, 'cuz a Terpstra beta don’t stop! 
All kidding aside, I love his software - it just takes a long time to be “finished”.
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That’s a difference of opinion for us, then. Rather than incorporating something by a linked reference, NP duplicates data across all the notes. It does the same sort of thing in other areas, like tasks. And the result is that you have the same data duplicated in a number of places, leaving significant opportunity for things to get out of whack - especially if you stop using the software and later have to change a shared block.
For me, that’s an issue. If it’s not for others, that’s cool.
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Agreed. Different software for different folks – thank goodness, or none of us would be happy. I remember the MS Office hegemony, and before that the Word/WordPerfect duopoly, all too well.
I long ago concluded that a little duplication or redundancy* is the price I pay for not getting locked in to specific apps – not just in this context but others as well. (For example, using Deckset to create slides from Markdown means, at a minimum, generating an .md file and .pdf file for every presentation, plus storing any embedded images as standalone files nearby.)
I’m fine with that. Text and occasional images are small, making changes to my documents is incredibly fast, it’s easy to automate mass changes if I need to, and I’d rather not deal with bloated software or trying to get my content out of weird file formats a few years down the road (even open source XML 
) – as happened to me repeatedly over the last several decades of using computers.
- see what I did there?
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