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.

passthejoe by Steven Rosenberg - Standard Notes

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

Why is it so hard (or impossible) to get a clean Markdown export out of Obsidian and Standard Notes?