passthejoe by Steven Rosenberg - Nextcloud

Is Standard Notes worth $90 to $120 a year?

2026-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

Right now I'm in working on this post in Standard Notes</a>, one of the free-to-paid cross-platform notetaking apps.

You can export a text file and give it any suffix you want — even .md</code>, but this is a free/paid app, and you can only "see" Markdown rendered if you go to the first paid tier, called Productivity, which is $90. The Professional tier at $120 — a 33% increase over Productivity.

I like the app. Without a paid membership, it's pretty basic. And despite the pay-to-play nature of most of the features that take it beyond the basic "it's a text editor with autosave," the app</a> is open source under the AGPL 3.0 license. On the project's home page</a>, under "Standard Notes," it says, "Powered by Proton," which I think refers to the Proton Native framework</a> to create desktop applications using the same syntax as React Native, and not carrying a whole browser along with it like an Electron app.

Not only is the desktop app open-source, but so is the server, which is billed as "fully self-hostable."

So on the surface, this seems like a better way to get a cross-platform, "native" desktop app. Better than Electron, I guess, though I'm not an expert. There's still a bit of a delay when starting the app on my 9-year-old HP laptop. It takes about 12 seconds to launch on this hardware. It could be better for you. Could be worse. But the app is very responsive once loaded.

In addition to the desktop app, there's also a web app at https://app.standardnotes.com/, as well as apps for Android and iOS.

In April I signed up for a free account to see what I could do with Standard Notes? And now that it's May, I got an email from Standard Notes reminding me about what the app includes for free accounts:

Your free account comes with standard features like end-to-end encryption, multiple-device sync, and two-factor authentication. </blockquote> Then it reminded me about what I'm missing by not subscribing for $90-$120/year. Right now I'm in this note and wanted to search for a word. I couldn't figure it out. Ctrl-F doesn't do it. It turns out that search isn't available in text notes, the only kind you can create with the Free plan. You need to use Super Notes in order to make them searchable</a>, and that's a paid feature. With most of the desktop notetaking apps I'm using, including Iotas and QOwnNotes, I can search for something in all the notes. At least I was able to switch to dark mode. I can also give a note any name I want, and it will export with that name as the file name. All I have to do is replace .txt</code> with .md</code>. So for static-site blogging with Zola and Hugo, this is a solid choice. The Standard Notes app also has a Command Palette. Is it related to the last app with this feature that I tried? This must be a feature from Obsidian, or one of the other paid notetaking apps because I've seen it a few times now. You can type Markdown in Standard Notes, but it doesn't render. Markdown rendering is available, but it costs. At the risk of repeating myself, here are Standard Notes' three available plans: Free</li> Productivity: $90 per year</li> Professional: $120 per year</li> </ul> If you commit to 5 years, you get a "break": Productivity: $299 for 5 years</li> Professional: $349 for 5 years</li> </ul> If I loves this tool above all others, I'd pay. But I'm not sure. In addition to Markdown rendering, things like the ability to create checklists, spreadsheets, keep a daily journal, create folders and use a "Web Clipper" to save web pages as notes are all part of the $90 package. It's not a bad price, but it's hard to justify, especially if I can't test out all the features beforehand. Refunds are available within 14 days for the $90 Productivity plan and 90 days for the $120 Professional plan. Mimiri Notes</a> is at least somewhat comparable and only charges $12 per year. Standard Notes is objectively a better product, but is it $72 per year better? The problem is that in that time, I've been exploring using a hosted Nextcloud account for notes and note sync. I have a free account with TheGood.Cloud</a> for the next six months, and after that it's only $28 a year. It doesn't have the "advanced" notetaking features of Standard Notes, but it's also a lot cheaper and allows me to use other apps on Android and desktop for notetaking, calendar and general file sync. I'm not ready yet to boot Standard Notes out of the running as my notetaking solution, but I don't know if I need what it's offering, and $90 is above what I'm willing to spend as an individual for this service.



Iotas and Nextcloud Notes sync
2026-04-30T00:00:00+00:00
One of the key features of the Iotas</a> notetaking app is the ability to sync with Nextcloud Notes</a>.</p>
I started a free-for-now Nextcloud account at https://thegood.cloud</a> to test this. Free</em> is a pretty good price for a 2 GB hosted Nextcloud account, and if I decide to stick with TheGood.Cloud after my 180-day trial, the service costs €23.88 per year for 10 GB. That's $28.11 USD. Not bad for a whole year. Unless I decide to start hosting some heavy duty files, I'll never get close to 10 GB. I can't even see getting to 1 GB.</p>
Once I got the Nextcloud account established, I went to Iotas and set up Nextcloud Sync. I was already logged in to TheGood.Cloud's web interface, and the sync immediately worked. I had the same notes in Iotas and Nextcloud.</p>
For most regular notes, including to-do lists, Nextcloud Notes is great. Writing and editing notes can be done in the Web interface as well as the Nextcloud and separate Nextcloud Notes</a> Android apps. It all works.</p>
The Nextcloud Notes Android app works a bit better for its own subset of Nextcloud than the overall Netxcloud app. I have both on the phone.</p>
And with all my notes in Iotas, I can export the individual Markdown-formatted notes to my Zola</a> blog's content directory on my laptop and then build and deploy the site. It would be the same for Hugo</a> with different front matter.</p>
After spending a few weeks looking at notetaking apps, I wasn't sure I needed syncing, but so far I'm doing quite a bit of writing on my phone. To that end, I found my old Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Both had severe battery corrosion, and the bin they went. It didn't matter. I'm using the phone and ... my fingers.</p>
When it comes to things like to-do lists, it's very</em> convenient to be able to access them on and sync them to mobile. Of course you can do this with Google Keep or other paid apps like Obsidian and Standard Notes, but there's a nice degree of flexibility with Nextcloud. You can use a hosted Nextcloud account, like I'm doing, or stand up your own Nextcloud server.</p>
The more I test the sync between Nextcloud's web view, mobile apps and my local notetaking apps, the more impressed I am with how well it works.</p>
In addition to blog posts and to-do lists, I'm also using the Notes app to save URLs I find when I'm on the phone. I just share a web page into Notes, and I can write about it later. I wish there was a way to do this with Nextcloud on the desktop.</p>
The main</em> problem I'm having with Iotas and Nextcloud Notes is about the rendering of Zola blog front matter</a>. I'm using tabs (which generally manifest themselves in my editors as spaces</em>) to preserve the TOML formatting, and Nextcloud Notes tends to strip out the spaces and some of the linefeeds. I haven't quite figured out this issue just yet, but I'm thinking about it.</p>


QOwnNotes and Iotas sync with Nextcloud in two different ways
2026-04-30T00:00:00+00:00
I just found out that QOwnNotes</a> doesn't handle file sync with Nextcloud</a> in the same way as Iotas</a>.</p>
Instead, QOwnNotes relies on the Nextcloud desktop app</a> to sync the Markdown files generated by QOwnNotes with those on the Nextcloud server.</p>
I've already been thinking of testing the Nextcloud app, even though it's not needed for Iotas, which does the sync on its own with flat files on the Nextcloud side and an SQLite database for Iotas.</p>
I'd still like to see how well Nextcloud sync works. A reliable, Dropbox-like sync system would be pretty nice. Until recently, I had no idea that sync — or a separate app that does it — was even part of Nextcloud.</p>
Even if I get sync working for QOwnNotes and Nextcloud, I don't think that Nextcloud will recognize the tags that QOwnNotes can give to notes, though that would be nice.</p>
Despite the hurdle of syncing with Nextcloud, some of the things I appreciate about QOwnNotes are:</p>

Notes are stored in plain text files instead of a database</li>
Notes can be stored in nested folders</li>
Notes can be further categorized with multiple tags</li>
</ul>
In contrast, this is the situation for Iotas:</p>

Notes are stored in a SQLite database. They only "become" actual files if you export them.</li>
Notes can have a single category</em>. They can't have multiple categories, and there are no tags or folders, though a Category in Iotas mirrors a folder in Nextcloud.</li>
</ul>