Member-only story
After building my own notes app, I went back to Evernote. Then I built it again.
Not long ago I wrote about building my own notes app. It worked. People seemed to like it. I had hashtags, due dates, an auto-logout countdown, and the quiet satisfaction of a 48 kilobyte database file that I owned end to end.
Then I used it for a few weeks. And realised what I actually wanted was Evernote… without paying for Evernote…
This is the part of the story where the self-hoster is supposed to double down. Build more. Add features. Fork something and call it a learning experience. Instead I did the unthinkable: I opened Evernote, signed in, and started writing notes again.
It worked beautifully for about a week.
Then I looked at the pricing. Evernote works. It also costs more per year than my entire VPS, and stores my life with a company in Italy whose name sounds like a kitchenware brand.
So I closed the tab and started over.
What I learned from version one
The first notes app I built was good for the things it set out to do. Cards on a dashboard. Hashtags as filters. A flat list of notes I could search instantly. That model works if you write mostly short, atomic notes and tag them well.
