This is a trimmed down version of an email that was sent out to our users on November 3, 2021.
The End of Early Pricing
Early Pricing is our 5-year plan, which was marked down at a steep discount as a sort of "capital raise" program---you give us a single relatively large sum in advance, and we give you prolonged service. But because the program was offered at such a discount, it couldn't be sustainable in the long run.
We're glad to announce the time has finally come to graduate out of early pricing, and into a more long-term focused, sustainable pricing model.
Next week, we'll be launching our new subscription plan lineup, which features different plans which offer different features at different price points.
Before we describe those to you, it's important to note that if you already have a pre-existing subscription, these changes or prices do not affect you. Existing subscribers are always taken care of.
What's Changing
Currently, we only have 1 subscription plan offered at different time commitments. However, we often get the feedback that some users want only one particular feature, and don't want to pay for the whole offering.
Our new subscription system consists of 3 different plans that each cater to a different use case.
Existing Subscribers
If you are an existing subscriber, whether monthly, yearly, or 5-yearly, you automatically get the highest Pro Plan, with no price increase! You're locked into the price you signed up with, and your plan will continue to renew at that price indefinitely until you cancel. You can also extend your plan today with another X years at current pricing.
New Release
Our new release next week also features our brand new unified subscription architecture, so that you no longer need two (potentially confusing) accounts to use Standard Notes. And you no longer need to manually activate your paid benefits and install them one-by-one---everything just works seamlessly! It's taken a tremendous amount of architectural and engineering efforts to pull this off, and we couldn't be happier to finally be shipping this.
With this new architecture, we're now able to finally begin shipping and working on user-facing features which we can rightfully charge for depending on complexity. This takes us to our roadmap.
Roadmap
We have a few major things we have our sights on for the very near future:
1. Built-in encrypted files. Our current solution for files uses FileSafe with third-party cloud providers, which isn't the best out-of-box user experience. Our new experience will focus on built-in file handling available on all our applications and synced directly to your existing Standard Notes account. Your storage capacity will depend on your plan. For example, the Plus Plan might allow for 5GB of storage, while the Pro Plan might allow for 25GB storage (exact storage specifications TBD).
2. Native folders for web, desktop, and mobile. The current nestable folders solution requires an extension that isn't available on mobile. Nativizing this feature will allow for a much more pleasant user experience.
3. Multiple account support. The ability to quickly and easily switch between multiple accounts, perhaps if you have one account you use for work and one account for personal notes.
4. Tabbed editor support. The ability to open and edit more than one note at a time, each in a separate tab, similar to how code editors or web browsers work today.
5. Offline editors on mobile. Currently you need an online connection to use our speciality editors (non-plaintext) on mobile. Offline editors on mobile will download editors to your device, like we do on desktop.
6. Large database load improvements for mobile. Currently when you have many thousand notes on mobile, startup decryption experience may vary depending on your device specifications. New advancements in React Native have however potentially opened the door for drastic performance improvement opportunities.
7. Continuing to improve our UI/UX. You may have already noticed new design elements in our web and desktop app. This includes a redesigned account menu and a brand new general purpose Preferences pane to accommodate the variety of configuration options we have now and will expand into in the future. The rest of our applications have already been redesigned in our private Figma, just waiting to be implemented in code! We can't wait to continue gradually releasing small doses of this redesign, until it is fully complete.
New Website
We have a new website! Check it out at standardnotes.com.
Join our Discord
We caved and now we have a Discord. We still have Slack too. But that's ok. Each platform encourages a different culture and invites a new audience. Standard Notes is crypto friendly, and the crypto community loves Discord, so we'd love to open our doors to them.
You can also follow us on Twitter (@StandardNotes). We don't tweet much because we're always working. But maybe one day we'll hire one of those hip social media people that tweet in lowercase and pick internet fights with Wendy's.
That's all for now.
Thanks for being on this journey with us. We look forward to continuing to build out the best, most secure encrypted note-taking application available. It's hard work. But we're doing it. And we love every second of it.
Thanks for reading ✓
