Why NoteLace Has No Permanent Free Tier

We made a deliberate choice: NoteLace has no permanent free tier. The short reason is that a sustainable independent product needs a sustainable model, and a permanent free tier tends to undermine that in ways we were not willing to accept.

Here is the longer version.

The honest problem with "free"

Free tiers for software products are not actually free — someone is paying. Usually it is users, in the form of attention (ads) or data (sold to third parties), or it is paying customers subsidising a neglected free experience. Sometimes it is the founders burning savings until the economics force a pivot.

None of those outcomes sounded good to us. We are building NoteLace as a tool we want to exist for a long time. That means we need revenue, and we would rather get it the straightforward way: charge a fair price for something useful.

No ads. No selling your data. No upsell maze where the free plan is deliberately hobbled to pressure you into upgrading. Just a product you pay for because it is worth it.

Aligned incentives

When you pay for NoteLace, you are our customer. That means we answer to you — not to an advertiser, not to a data broker, not to a growth metric that requires keeping a free cohort engaged by any means necessary.

If NoteLace is not good enough for you to pay for, we want to know why and fix it, not paper over it with a free tier that lets us claim a big user number. The constraint is useful.

Cloud sync has real costs

NoteLace is local-first — your notes live on your device and work fully offline. But sync across devices goes through our servers, and servers cost real money every month. Storage, bandwidth, backups, uptime. We are not a venture-funded company with room to absorb those costs indefinitely in exchange for growth. Offering sync for free at scale would eventually force a choice between cutting the service and monetising in ways we have already ruled out.

What you actually get

We think the model we landed on is fair:

14-day free trial, no card required. You get the full product — all features, sync included — to try properly before you spend anything.
€5/month or €48/year after that. The annual plan works out to €4/month, which is roughly one coffee.
No lock-in. Even if your subscription lapses, you keep full read access to your notes and can export your entire vault to Markdown files at any time. Your notes are never held hostage.

That last point matters to us. Pricing page has the full details, but the principle is simple: your data is yours. We store it in a local database, in Markdown, and we give you a one-click export. If you ever want to leave, you leave with everything.

What happens if you stop paying?

Editing pauses. That is it. You can still open NoteLace, read every note, search your vault, and export the whole thing to '.md' files. We will not delete your data or lock you out of what you wrote. We think that is the minimum decent behaviour for a notes app that people trust with their thinking.

This is not for everyone, and that is okay

Some people genuinely need a free notes app and there are good ones. We are not trying to be the right tool for every person. We are trying to be the right tool for people who want a fast, private, local-first notes app on macOS, Windows, and Linux — and who are happy to pay a small amount for something that respects their data and their time.

If that is you, the trial is there. No card, no commitment. Try it for two weeks and see if it fits how you work.

If it does not, no hard feelings. Your notes export cleanly and you move on.

We would rather build something a smaller group of people genuinely value than something a large group tolerates because it is free. That is the bet we are making.