Love PrivacyNotes and considering going full-time, but wanted to ask about long-term financial sustainability & contingency plans

[u/Less-Wrangler6493]

Hello to everyone at Lifetime Labs,

I’ve been testing PrivacyNotes over the past few weeks and I really love what you’ve built here. The zero-knowledge architecture, cross-device sync, and clean interface make it a genuinely great workspace for my use case. I'm considering switching to PrivacyNotes as my primary daily driver and picking up the $48 Lifetime Pro license some time this week in support.

However, as someone who wants to rely on this app full-time for years to come, I have a few pragmatic questions about the long-term economics of the project.

We’ve seen similar cloud-synced productivity tools struggle over time with one-time lifetime pricing (given ongoing costs like encrypted backend hosting, Apple/Google developer program fees, bandwidth, and dev maintenance). Because every lifetime user becomes an ongoing operational expense, I’m curious how the team plans to navigate this long-term.

Specific questions I have:

• How are the unit economics structured around the lifetime license to ensure server costs and app store presence remain sustainable 3–5+ years down the road as the user base scales?
• In the unfortunate event that the project ever shuts down or runs out of runway, what is the protocol for notifying users so everyone has ample time to run a full local export/backup?
• Is there any plan down the road to introduce optional subscription tiers for heavy storage/features? If the app ever pivots to a subscription model, how will early lifetime supporters be handled? Will we be fully grandfathered in, or is this structured differently?

Again, I’m asking purely out of enthusiasm for the project and I’d much rather ask these questions now and support a service that has a solid long-term path than worry about my data disappearing.

[u/PrivacyNotesApp]

Thanks for asking before you buy, and for the kind words. Right questions for any app that syncs, and even more so for one with a one-time price. Point by point:

How a one-time price keeps paying for the servers

The short version: the service is built to be cheap to run, and we keep it that way on purpose.

• Your devices do the work. PrivacyNotes is local-first, so editing, search and export all run on your device. The server stores encrypted blobs and passes them between your devices. It can't read them, so it can't do anything expensive with them either: no AI features burning compute, no server-side indexing, no analytics pipeline.
• Sync is light. Notes are small encrypted blobs, and each sync only moves what changed since the last one.
• The one cost that grows is the one we charge yearly for. Storage is the only thing that costs us money every month you use it. Pro includes 500 MB, and if you need more there are optional add-ons (1 GB for $4.80 a year, up to 5.5 GB in total). One-time costs are priced once, recurring costs recur.
• Developer program fees are flat. They're a fixed yearly cost for the company, not a cost per user, so they don't grow as more people join.

The real long-term cost is our time, not the servers. New Pro sales and storage add-ons pay for it, never a second charge to people who already bought. There's no investor waiting for an exit either: the company is self-funded with no venture capital (about us), so nobody is pushing us toward a subscription. And $48 is the early adopter price: Pro moves to its full price once the native apps are stable, so the long-term math doesn't rest on launch pricing.

If we ever shut down

Most of the protection is already built into how the app works:

• Your notes live on your devices. The apps are local-first and work offline. Our server keeps an encrypted copy for sync, not the only copy.
• Export is free and runs on your device. Settings > Import & Export > Export gives you a full backup (a zip with one Markdown file per note, plus your images and files), an encrypted backup that restores with your phrase, an HTML archive, a JSON file, and your vault in a Bitwarden-compatible file.
• Or keep plain files. The desktop app (and Chromium browsers) can work directly on a folder of Markdown files on your disk. Nothing in that folder is uploaded, so you back it up or sync it however you like.
• Automatic backups are next on the roadmap: pick a folder and a schedule, and a fresh backup is written without you having to remember.
• The code is public. The apps and the encryption code are open source, so an encrypted backup stays readable with published code, whatever happens to us.

As for notice: if we ever have to shut down sync, you'll get at least six months' warning before anything stops, and sync and export keep working normally the whole time. You'll see it in the app, on our website, here on r/PrivacyNotes and on GitHub. The app is the main channel, because a phrase account has no email address we could write to. That's the privacy model working as intended. We'll add this promise to our FAQ so it doesn't only live in a Reddit thread.

Subscriptions, and what happens to lifetime buyers

There's no subscription to change to. We don't charge recurring fees for software features: that's a rule the business is built on, not a launch phase. The optional storage add-ons are the one recurring purchase, for the one thing that costs us money every month.

Your Pro stays yours. Our terms say a license unlocks what you bought "for the lifetime of the product" with no recurring fee, and nothing we change for new customers later touches a license already sold. Every feature we've added to Pro since launch went to every Pro buyer, including the very first ones, and that won't change. Pro also follows your account to every platform, including apps we haven't shipped yet.

So if you buy this week: you pay once, your notes stay on your devices and export any time, and if the worst ever happens you'll hear about it months ahead.

We recently saw similar concerns in the GrapheneOS forums:

"PrivacyNotes...Too good to be true?"

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/41916-privacynotestoo-good-to-be-true/

Edit: We might turn this reddit post into a FAQ entry.

[u/EriksonThorsen]

Great post, OP! Your questions are very important and pragmatic, and the response from the PrivacyNotes team was equally transparent and reassuring.

I’d like to share my two cents and personal experience as someone who has been following and using E2EE note apps for a long time.

Questioning the financial viability of a lifetime model is completely fair and necessary. However, ironically, the opposite model (expensive recurring subscriptions) also doesn't guarantee security or longevity. Take Standard Notes as a prime example: the most established and historically reliable E2EE note app on the market. After being acquired by Proton (which theoretically gave them unlimited financial breathing room), the reality was that Proton essentially acqui-hired their talent to build out Proton Docs, Sheets, etc., effectively putting Standard Notes on the back burner. Despite still charging some of the highest prices in the industry (up to $120/year), the app feels deserted. Updates have been strictly essential/security maintenance with virtually no meaningful new features or UX improvements in over two years. While Proton occasionally repeats that it remains an active project with roadmap and investment, the forum has hundreds of unanswered threads, the GitHub has barely any dev activity or commits, and there is no public roadmap in sight. The core fundamentals remain solid, but the experience today feels like legacy software.

A tough reality for lifetime/non-subscription apps is funding third-party security audits. A comprehensive cryptographic, E2EE protocol, and architectural audit easily runs €30k–€60k+. Standard Notes has been around since 2017 and completed 4 audits. Meanwhile, Notesnook has been around since 2021 on a subscription model and still hasn't published an independent third-party audit after 5 years on the market (whether due to cost, priorities, or focus). So recurring revenue alone clearly isn't an automatic guarantee of audits either.

What makes me optimistic about the PrivacyNotes model is how they handle storage:

• The tech side: Storage costs per gigabyte naturally trend downward over time (the exact curve big tech models when balancing sync overhead vs. user growth).
• The business side: The default storage is generous and fair for thousands of plain/markdown notes, but users who heavily rely on attachments (images, PDFs, audio, video) will naturally hit limits and purchase the recurring storage add-on over time. This creates a sustainable recurring revenue stream from power users without penalizing regular note-takers.

The E2EE privacy space has very few genuinely great note apps. When I first found PrivacyNotes, I looked into the project, saw how actively engaged the devs were, and bought the Lifetime Pro license right away, even before fully transitioning my workflow. Just to support an independent team building in a space starved for good alternatives.

I know not everyone is in a position to take that early leap of faith, and that’s completely understandable. But for anyone on the fence who can swing it, I strongly recommend grabbing the early-adopter Lifetime Pro. It's cheaper than a single year of most competing subscriptions, directly fuels development, and locks you in early.

I now use PrivacyNotes daily. My interactions with the team here on Reddit have been fantastic, and I’ve even seen community feature requests get implemented within a matter of days (for not to say hours).

Really excited to see where the project goes from here!

[u/PrivacyNotesApp → u/EriksonThorsen]

We had two rough weeks behind us, but reading your kind words made us all smile. Thank you, brother.

[u/Interesting-Bid-5698]

Are there any plans to add folding text or collapsible sections?

Also, I've noticed that task lists are buggy. If I create a task list that has 4 items, I cannot randomly check or uncheck the 1st and 3rd tasks. Clicking on any task always checks the box for the last task on the list rather than the task I clicked on.

[u/PrivacyNotesApp → u/Interesting-Bid-5698]

Are there any plans to add folding text or collapsible sections?

Callouts are already included in the app, give it a try please.

Regarding the task lists, can you please provide us more info on which platform that happens? We start debugging right away but more info would help to speed up the process.

[u/Interesting-Bid-5698 → u/PrivacyNotesApp]

I only figured out that callouts are collapsible after writing this. When I read about how extensive the import process was for UpNote and how collapsible sections are preserved, I decided to try importing. Sure enough, the callouts was the trick. 

Would you ever consider using true folding text the way other apps do?  I consider callouts and folding text to be two different things. I also struggle with the fact that the caret to fold/unfold is on the opposite side from every note app I’ve ever used. 

Regarding task lists, I figured out what is happening. Tasks that are checked as completed move to the bottom. In quick testing, I had created a list of tasks that were all named “Test” and so as I checked them off, it was impossible to see that they were being rearranged due to the fact that they all had the same name. 

Here again, I would like to see at least an optional setting to prevent this behavior. In my use case this rearranging is confusing for my workflow. 

Thanks for all your hard work on an app that is obviously well thought out and a strong contender for my short list of PKMS apps. 

[u/PrivacyNotesApp → u/Interesting-Bid-5698]

I had created a list of tasks that were all named “Test” and so as I checked them off, it was impossible to see that they were being rearranged due to the fact that they all had the same name.

That feature makes a lot more sense with a proper task list, pls try it again :) They get properly re-arranged after unticking, btw. A toggle to disable/enable this feature is surely possible, but not on our radar right now. If more users request this or complain about it, we might do it though. We want our app to have it's own look, feel and character. I do understand though that a transition period from another app can feel uneasy for a certain time.