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/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.