I've been building a Markdown note-taking app for 3 years

It looks good, and I like your pricing model more than the Standard Notes one (I don't want to drop $149 at once on a web app, but the 75% discount for doing so makes the monthly price seem way too expensive). Two things that stop me pulling the trigger:

1. I need a web app. I want to be able to call up my notes from a computer, anywhere, without installing anything.

2. A 60 day trial seems like the wrong way to test a note taking app - it makes me feel like you're going to hold my data hostage unless I migrate away within that timescale. A much smaller (5-10MB) quota with no time limit would allow me to test it properly, and it's already a part of my workflow by the time I hit the limitations of the free account, so I'm more likely to actually upgrade.

Running a project for three years alone on the side takes a lot of discipline. So often we become 'passionate' about some projects and quickly abandon them once the initial excitement wears off. Congratulations to the author!

Eerily, I have also been building a Markdown note-taking app alone for 2 years [0]. It is also e2e encrypted, but compared to Inkdrop, needs more work on the UI. But it works perfectly as a CLI.

- [0] https://github.com/dnote/dnote

Hi Tayuka,

Congratulations on the launch! Great to see end-to-end encryption made the cut. It seems hard to put the burden on users never to lose their login password though — they lose all their data when they do. Have you looked at the Tanker SDK? It’s an open-source, cross-platform SDK for end-to-end encryption (with a zero-knowledge key distribution service), that’s very user friendly when it comes to recovery.

Website: https://tanker.io/product

JS SDK: https://github.com/TankerHQ/sdk-js

I've been a happy user of this product for about half of its lifetime (in the middle of my 2nd yearly subscription).

If I were to build one, it would be quite similar: intuitive design, some GTD support, Markdown support. It has all the features that I need, and the developer is easy to reach when there's a problem (I've been mentioned in a few changelogs). I appreciate the openness of the developer about the features he's gonna build next. I'd prefer it to be open source, but I understand that financing an open source project wouldn't be as easy from the business perspective. $50/year (IIRC) is really, really worth it for me.

EDIT: Here's a link to a note that I've made when I was looking for a new note-taking solution: https://community.inkdrop.app/note/f607a6970af9e4b40795ec5be...

Should I be as impressed as I am that one guy has an app that works on 5 different operating systems even if he is using a cross platform framework or has cross platform front end development become that easy?

Whichever it is, great job! I don’t need something like this right now, but I am favoriting it just in case I do later.

I just switched to the Joplin markdown note app (from DS Note, and Evernote before that). It’s free, works on desktop and mobile, etc etc. Frankly I love it and wish I switched earlier.

Anyone have a good comparison vs Inkdrop?

Basically all the comments here are just critiques. My 2 cents: excellent work, its extremely hard to stick with something for 3 years, especially with people's constant criticism and worries it isn't "big enough". The attitude of the developer seems quite wise and seasoned. Hearing things like "I'm making tools I use" and "I'd rather be small and opinionated" or "I'll take paying customers over droves of free users" makes my heart warm. Congratulations and good work -- ignore haters and people with "suggestions" after their cursory 30-second glance at your work you've been eating / breathing for 3 straight years. My go-to response to such things has become "wow in X years I didn't think to google 'note taking app', thanks for that amazing suggestion!" :P (end salty solo-dev rant)

This definitely looks great. But I feel like 5 USD a month is a bit much for _"just a note taking app"_. Like I pay 5 USD a month for Spotify and the value it gives is substantially higher than a note-taking app, and I do not mean to offend you with that. Maybe I'm saying this because I'm still studying, maybe it will different coming September when I'm working and got an income. I don't know.

I like these apps because I’ve been trying note taking for 30 years and have had many false starts of solo projects over the years. So when someone releases it makes me a little happy.

I like markdown because the interoperability is high. I’d like a command line way to just create a new note in one line that gets stuck somewhere that can be added on or moved around later (eg, “note Inkdrop should be investigated and forked later on #notes #hn #app”).

My problem is that phones are just too slow for me to fire up and start a note so I tend to wait and forget before I can write down. I’ve seen a lot of approaches to digital zettelkasten [0], but the UX requires a lot of familiarity that lead me back to eventually (not) writing my own.

[0] https://zettelkasten.de/

> Electron Markdown editor with monthly subscription to boot.

Beautiful as it is, you're competing with Bear using the sub model, and my common sense to use buy-once native apps (like Sublime Text). This is a non-starter for me.

I really like the project but I struggle with the fact that almost all Markdown editors, even note-taking applications, only offer you a rendered view separately from the file you edit. When I am taking notes, they should be rendered where I type them down in order to be easily digestible. Even later on, I will probably make a few smaller edits, so I can't solely rely on the rendered review.

So far, I've only discovered Typora, which is an application unfortunately plagued with performance and interopability issues - and I even had some data loss bugs. So, are there any alternative, "rich" (i.e. pictures, tables, math, code) WYSIWYM note-taking applications?

Looks very nice, I just signed up.

Ignore the people muttering about the subscription. If your tool scratches an itch, the price and how you pay is irrelevant.

One thing, the email sent to verify my account got marked as spam by google. Not sure why, SPF and DKIM both marked as PASS. Maybe they just hate Amazon SES.

Nobody's mentioned notable yet: https://github.com/notable/notable

Many of us speak about adverts that inform as being ethical. I consider this post one of them. I wish all ads were like this one, a story.

a) Joplin is free and seems to do the exact same thing? (+actual working todo-lists)

b) Having md-notes and a dual view seems redundant... In general I either work with the notes, then the "nice view" helps nothing and on the rare occasion, I print/share it, I'm more than fine with an export button. Inline math would be great though

c) all of these apps seem to think that you'r really needing yet another sh*y webapp on your desktop. Why not store files on your android-sd-card in a flat file structure, which you can easily sync (syncthing, termux...) and edit with your texteditor of choice on the desktop.

I would love, love, love if I could self-host this and would happily pay a fee if it meant I got the source for the backend and could do that. Product looks great, but I will hold off until I find such an option.

I have been looking for years for a viable self-hosted Evernote/OneNote replacement I can sync between devices.

Takuya; You can differentiate from your competitors on business model!

I'm of the "organize everything in random .md files spread throughout my filesystem" type, but my friends would find this handy, and the design is beautiful.

oh lord I've become "that guy". My first instinct was to say something along the lines of "well emacs and deft will do blah blah blah blah blah".

This looks really slick, and actually fills a need I identified about a couple of years ago. Namely a OneNote style app but with Markdown.

Nice job, I hope you get a lot of paying users!

Why all that effort to have synced Side-by-side View instead of implementing an editable WYSIWYG view, like Typora?

(Typora is nice, and popular, but it has some serious performance and usability issues. Some competition would be good.)

The market for markdown editors and note-takers is already saturated. Joplin appears to have all the features yours does and probably more, plus it is open source. There are a handful of other open source Markdown editors as well for note-taking that have most (if not more) of the features you are including. I don't know why anyone would pick a subscription service when they can get the same thing for free and have access to the source code to help implement their own features. Plus syncing with Joplin can be accomplished on multiple providers like Google Drive.

Just signed up for a Standard Notes subscription today. How does this compare? Seems they are both e2e encrypted with Markdown and code highlighting. Standard notes also has rich text and todo list plugins.

If you're targeting your service to developers, you shouldn't set irritating password requirements like "alphanumerics and symbols". Whatever that means, because my password is still being rejected even though it satisfies both requirements (it has both letters and symbols).

Yet, you allow 4 character passwords ("4-100 characters"). What's the logic in that?

Edit: it looks like the password requirement is actually "any characters except whitespace". You should fix the error message.

Nice to see a product using CouchDB. From a quick glance, the revision utility seems to use CouchDB's revisions. Just a note to the dev: The _rev is not intended as a revision tool in CouchDB. Data will eventually be erased. See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28354346/couchdb-view-th...

Great work man, this is one of the few tools/use cases where I think mark down is really the right choice. Limited set of keywords means you don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about formatting. In the end it's easy enough to convert to HTML/PDF as an export to share.

On top of that, the tool looks slick af.

I don't think I want the cloud sync feature, have you considered an option to license the software with out that for a prorated cost?

Maybe a dumb question - but how did you create apps on so many different platforms? Did you have to separately code everything? Or did you use some framework?

I worked on a markdown flash card app briefly because so many accounting terms referenced other terms in their definitions. By linking flash cards together I could quickly jump between flashcards to review unfamiliar terms.

Rather than wikipedia where everything about a subject is recorded, flash cards were meant to be a distilled set of facts for a single term from a single course or textbook you were studying.

I overhauled my models when I realized that the same field or subject (which I organized into Decks) used the same term in two different contexts to mean different things. That also meant I could not reference cards simply by name in the markdown. So I updated all links to reference by id rather than name. So I had to build some UI to select cards by name and generate links.

Then I hit a wall when I realized I would need a good way to encode and render math formulas and that's when my hobby project died.

Also, in the end, I found that having such quick linked access to knowledge I was studying made me less likely to remember the material, not more. I relied too heavily on the cards and the ability to just click on a term I didn't remember.

So I think this is a really cool idea, some feedback:

1. would love to be able to toggle whether the markdown syntax is shown vs a polished/rendered view of the markdown without the # symbols showing etc. For me the whole point of writing markdown is that moment when you get to see it rendered all nicely on github, and this hybrid mode doesn't quite do it for me

2. tags are cool, but a folder hierarchy would be more appropriate for notes imo. I immediately wanted to right click on the side bar and create folders, but that's not a thing.

3. Accessibility via web browser, as other people have mentioned, would be nice

4. ability to export any note to PDF or a single HTML file with inline styling

5. option to use github's exact markdown stylesheet

6. The whole note "status" thing I think is a bit niche. I wouldn't use it at all as I have project management software for that sort of thing. I would use this for storing random bits of knowledge, how-to-type stuff, research/project ideas, that sort of thing. It's a cool feature, I just wish it was optional and there were more options for how to organize the notes.

It looks nice but it being Electron and subscription-based means I won't buy it. I'm pretty happy with Quiver.

A good looking Markdown app with syncing and clients for macOS, Linux, iPhone and iPad? I have been looking for this for years.

Hi Takuya,

Congratulations on the success! Your business is very inspirational to me. Thank you for all the great posts.

As a user of just slightly less than a year now - thank you! Ever since I gave up Evernote, I had been on the hunt for a clean note taking replacement and Inkdrop has been that for me. The new v4 looks great and works great!

Also end-to-end encrypted without a central server and using rich text instead of markdown https://collect-app.com/

Honnestly, my congratulations! I am in the same boat as you and 3 years is a long time especially when doing big/risky refactoring. I did my refactoring mainly to manage my application state, I really thought I would never gonna make it (and I was working in Swift, in Javascript it would have been nearly impossible to do the same thing...). But it was worth every second I spent on it: code is the main value of independant developers, so we should take great care of it!

I wish you good luck with your project and hope it will work.

For a code-snippet focused alternative with plugins for major editors and support for team libraries: https://www.cacher.io

I love markdown. It’s been my primary way of taking notes for many years.

A key benefit of the format to me is that text files will never be deprecated and are infinitely portable.

I saw mentioned a local cache. Would you add a pitch or squeeze page on this topic to help convince users like me? I want to love your product. The scrolling alone; beautiful.

Example user stories:

* can always see all notes as simple, well named, plainly organized, easy to read text files.

* Can output/sync certain folders of notes to plain text files. (To, for example, a Dropbox folder target)

Do you or do you plan to add any kind of sharing/collaborative editing to notes at all? Is the plugin system versatile enough to allow e.g. syncing notes to Jekyll blog posts?

Can anybody comment on the vim-keybindings plugin for Inkdrop. I've tried Notion, but I would really love a markdown/note-taking app with good vi-keybindings.

I like the design of this app a lot, but as with others like this, it feels like it wants me to double-pay for sync/storage I already have with iCloud or Dropbox.

Dang it I was hoping this would be like a Sublime Text style individual license and no cloud stuff. I can't upload work documents outside our network and I hate monthly fees for software.

If I was working anywhere else though I would totally consider this, even though $5 a month is pretty steep for a markdown application with cloud sync. I would probably spring for their yearly pricing of $49.90.

Cool! Does it support inter-note linking so that it can act like a kind of personal wiki? That would be a killer feature for me.

I've been using Typora which is a similar or even a better tool and it's free for now. I hope typora doesn't go the subscription/saas route. Everything is a subscription these days and you probably would be better off going with a different revenue model since the competition is heavy in the note taking market.

I really like gollum for this:

https://github.com/gollum/gollum

It's just markdown files in a git repository when you're in your full environment. But you get a read-write web wiki interface to use from anywhere.

I am looking to transition away from OneNote. Any tools to automate the transition to a new app like this?

In the spirit of tiny SaaS companies that offer great products, fman is a cross platform dual pane file manager I like.

(No affiliation, I just love that people can make a living making things like this)

https://fman.io/

I love this idea. I am more than a little jealous as I have wanted to build something like this since college. I just save my .md note files to a cloud drive and load them as a project w/ sublime text. It's not as beautiful as this but it works.

Is there a way to not have the cloud features and use dropbox/icloud for syncing instead?

If this is aimed at developers, why would they want to use it over their existing editor? I use VSCode and I write markdown in it all the time. A lot of other common editors also have support for it. Why would I want to use a seperate tool?

Awesome job releasing! That’s really difficult to do - and few people can say they have.

Imho, notetaking Apps are solving problems that shouldn‘t be solved by them. Encryption / sync should be done by the system via git, Nextcloud, Dropbox, ... Most of the rest is provided by a decent text editor.

> I built it because I wanted it.

I loved reading this line in Takuya's post. It felt a lot more real than all of those "made with " and "we open source" taglines that other projects throw around.

Thanks for posting this as I was looking for the exact same info as I will be designing-developing a productivity suite based on my ADHD experience of using productivity structure to control my ADHD.

very useful story

I love this! I've been using Notion for notes because I don't like Evernote, OneNote, or Google Keep. This may replace Notion for me. I'll give it a try!

This supports what I've always wanted in a markdown note taking app...

being able to directly copy and paste an image from the clipboard.

Keep up your good work! I read your article about v3, about a year ago. It's damn interesting to follow your journey.

The smart scroll on the editor is pretty nice. I don't know of any other Markdown app with dual view that does this.

Does it have code/text block collapse support? I've been looking for an app that can do this for years.

Still looking for something similar where I can also simply add links from Dropbox and other directories.

App looks promising, but is there a way for it to not convert tabs into spaces automatically?

Thanks for sharing! :-)

Inspiration for the rest of us to keep at it with our side-projects.

I love it! I have been waiting for something like this to replace Bear.

ehm, sorry, isn't markdown in itself editable with any text editor and thus no further "application" is necessary. The point of markdown is that every text editor can edit it.

I suggest you remove the misplaced apostrophe after "fox".

i am the only one that keeps using sticky notes on windows and google keep? do people take that many notes that they need to invest in such a fancy tool?

I was one of your volunteer beta testers years ago and provided some feedback. I still get a little salty when I see this app since you still terminated my account and made me pay :) hope you've been well

This has been on my to do list for three years. :)

Man, I want this, but I was burned by Collate.

Electron. As if I need another app taking up more RAM than needed

any single pane note taker with latex support?

sounds very agile

Nice, will give it a try. Advice, loose the uppercase on every word in

"End-to-end Encryption Support, Smart Scroll Sync for Side-by-side View, New Logo, and More."

Do people actually use all these "note taking" apps? I just use Google Docs for longer notes, and Apple Notes for ephemeral stuff, like dimensions of stuff I need to buy at Home Depot. The benefit of Docs is I can work with them anywhere and search is quite good. I've tried a few of such apps but for the life of me I can't see why I'd want to use them.

The app looks great. The dev is clearly talented.

Boostnote is a similar open source project.

Even they look similar.

FYI, a notetaker without inline images is a nogo for me. I need illustrations and screenshots with my notes. i'm happy to host the images externally.

The recent trend of terrible introductions is very annoying.

The first sentence on any new app should be...

App is a (what it can do) for (Windows/Mac/Linux) written in/with (languages/libraries/frameworks)

And FFS if it's an Electron app, SAY SO!!!!! Some people do avoid those on principal.

Why, so have I, and so has every other programmer on Earth.

https://mdhughes.tech/thoughtpy/

This has been mostly used as my engineering notebook, in lieu of stacks of Moleskines.

Simple command-line tool for editing and searching, a pipeline to any Markdown app for display, and DropBox for syncing, that's all I needed.

I could also use it on mobile with Pythonista, with some changes to get a DropBox path and open it in Editorial or Drafts, but so far just having the files is good enough.

My point is, every programmer should be capable of making certain basic tools of their own, such as note-taking, blogging, a calculator, and scripting languages.