I run a small software studio. We are deciding whether to build an archive app for large, old Evernote libraries. First I want to learn from people who made the move.
If you moved, or almost moved, a large library:
I read and answer every reply.
Evernote sucks.
Moved to UpNote and haven’t looked back, though I would be nervous moving to UpNote as a business. That said, Evernote is a sinking ship.
UpNote seems to be a common choice.
Two questions, if you have a minute: about how many notes did you move, and did anything break on the way (tags, note links, scans)?
And what would make you nervous about UpNote for business use?
This is the first time I heard about UpNote (which does not need to be bad as I am getting older and don’t know everything new and shiny 
).
Their business model. The developer is offering this app for $1.99 per month or $39.99 Lifetime. The developer addresses the issue of sustainability:
UpNote’s lean development model allows us to keep costs low while maintaining a reliable product. To support long-term sustainability, we limit attachments to 20MB and automatically reduce image resolution during upload to manage server resources.
We regularly monitor operational costs and adjust as needed to ensure stable growth. With strong user support and steady organic growth, we remain committed to improving and maintaining UpNote over the long term.
Well, this is not sustainable at $39.99. This won’t last as it is now:
UpNote is developed by a two-person team based in Vietnam. Our focus is on building a simple, intuitive, and reliable note-taking app that works smoothly across all platforms.
How can and will a two-person team keep an app up and running on iPhone, iPad, Windows 10/11, Android, Linux, and MacOS in the long run?
If you enable sync, the data is being stored using Firebase (Google Service). Apparently unlimited storage… For a $39.99 lifetime purchase…
No E2EE even when cloud sync is enabled.
And so on.
On the plus side: their blog dates back to 2018.
Being burnt with Evernote, this feels to me like being the next Evernote: too good to be true in the long run. If UpNote won’t be bought by someone like Bending Spoons, the developers will need to increase prices significantly or this will go away.
have you tried Bear or Obsidian? Both are superb apps. Obsidian also has free plan (you have to do manual sync). Both apps are super liked by the mac community
As I recall, I used Evernote from 2007 to 2018 with one break of maybe 12 - 18 months.
It was my “everything bucket” and held news stories, tips, and recipes clipped from the web. Scripts, log files, manuals, and trouble tickets that detailed solutions to problems. And a ton of PDF bills, bank statements, and receipts, etc
Documents were organized into separate online notebooks. Bank statements, etc were in local notebooks on my Mac. I used search almost exclusively. No tags, or links, etc.
At the end I exported each personal notebook as an .enex file which I imported into EagleFiler. The bank statements and sensitive files remained on my Mac, just about everything was uploaded to Google Drive. I had several thousand files in EN, if I lost anything important in the process I never noticed.
Work related files were moved to a Business Evernote account that I left with my company when I retired.
I was an avid user of Evernote for a decade. When the company started to crumble, around the time Obsidian came along, I stopped Evernote cold. Maybe a year later I thought of migrating the Evernote notes elsewhere. So, I looked at the Evernote library, with some distance on it, and realized there was nothing there I really needed.
I had spent a decade accumulating cruft that had nothing of lasting interest.
So deleted the account and moved on.
Just one take on migrating data. Maybe it’s not actually gold.
Katie
The second part is spot on, because Firebase is not exactly cheap at scale but I suspect users on the monthly tier are subsidizing heavy users on the lifetime license.
The first part is the most worrying, while I believe that these days a two person operation can run a service like UpNote there is a real “bus factor” at work here.
I keep using Evernote as a last-resort dumpster for everything because it ingests everything you can throw at it in any way and the search is magnificent. The product itself is not as bad as it used to be and I am keen to keep it. And most importantly, my wife loves it for some reason.
But! I migrated everything away when it was just acquired by Bending Spoons just in case. Tried Apple Notes and it struggled quite a bit when syncing my 25k+ notes across different devices (the note numbers never quite matched) so I went all the Kepano way: “Files over apps”. And that’s the hill I’ll die on, I can use Devon, Obsidian, plain Finder, Emacs or even my own vibecoded notetaking app on a bunch of files that live in iCloud Drive and to be fair I’m not looking back: they are all in my mobile devices when I need them and search is ok-ish in the Files app.
They did increase the price before like lifetime which was around $29.9.
Both developers live in Vietnam where the cost of living is much cheaper than American and European cities. I wonder if cloud services are based on the local price as well.
Have you checked out Harbor Notes yet. Good alternative.