The verdict, up front: for most people, a folder of .md files plus one good search tool beats the paid note app. The paid app is better software. You will not use the part that makes it better.
Disclosure before we start: no affiliate links here, no sponsorships, nobody paid us. And the writer is openly biased toward plain text. You’ve been warned in both directions.
The honest part about the apps
The category leaders are genuinely good at the three things that matter: capture (get a thought in fast), sync (it’s on your phone before you’ve closed the laptop), and search (find it later). These are real engineering problems and the good apps solved them well. Frictionless capture across devices is not nothing.
So this is not a “they’re all scams” piece. They work. The product is real.
The problem is you.
What your usage actually looks like
Open your note app. Look at the structure you built. The nested notebooks, the tags, the daily-review system you set up the first weekend.
Now look at how you use it: a flat pile of notes, sorted by “most recent,” that you append to and never reopen. A grocery list. A wifi password. Three meeting notes you’ll never read again. A draft of a text you didn’t send.
That’s not a knowledge base. That’s a to-do list with a monthly fee.
This is the gap. You’re paying for capture-sync-search-plus-backlinks-plus-graph-view, and you’re using capture. The other features aren’t broken. You’re just not the person they were built for, and that’s fine, but you should stop paying as if you were.
The three options, fairly
The proprietary cloud app. Great capture, great sync, real search. The catch is structural: your notes live in their format, on their servers, behind their login. Export usually exists but it’s often messy — formatting that doesn’t survive the round trip, attachments that scatter. And the price tends to drift upward over the years while the free tier quietly shrinks. None of that means the app is bad. It means your notes are a tenant, not an owner.
Plain Markdown files in a folder. Portable, greppable, free, yours forever. Open in any editor on any OS for the rest of your life. No login, no sync outage, no “you’ve hit your device limit.” The tradeoff is honest: you assemble your own sync (a synced folder works fine) and there’s no graph view holding your hand. For a flat pile of notes you never revisit, that’s exactly zero features lost.
A local Markdown app like Obsidian. Free for personal use, your notes stay as local .md files on disk, and there’s a deep plugin ecosystem plus backlinks and a graph if you genuinely want them. It’s the middle path: the ownership of plain text with a nicer front door. If “I want to link notes together and occasionally see the web of them” is a real need and not a fantasy you have on Sunday nights, this is the pick.
The free setup that won
Here’s the whole thing.
# 1. A folder. That's the database.
mkdir -p ~/notes
# 2. A note is a file. Create one however you like.
$EDITOR ~/notes/2026-06-22-wifi-passwords.md
Search it with ripgrep, which is fast enough that you stop thinking of search as a feature:
# Find every note that mentions "tax"
rg -i tax ~/notes
# Just the filenames, for a quick "where did I put that"
rg -il "passport" ~/notes
# List notes touched in the last 7 days
find ~/notes -name '*.md' -mtime -7
That’s it. Folder, editor, ripgrep. Free, portable, no account.
If you want backlinks and a graph, point Obsidian at ~/notes and keep everything above working unchanged — it’s the same files. Nothing about adding a nicer reader takes your plain text away.
When this goes wrong: a flat folder of hundreds of files needs some convention or search stops saving you. Date-prefix your filenames (2026-06-22-thing.md) so they sort chronologically, and put a keyword or two in the first line of each note so rg has something to grab. If you skip both, you’ve just rebuilt the messy pile, only now it’s also your problem to maintain.
The real dealbreakers
Three things that should actually move you off a paid app, none of which are about features:
- Export and lock-in. If getting your notes out is painful, you don’t own them. Test the export before you have ten years of notes inside, not after.
- Price creep. A subscription is a bet that you’ll keep getting enough value to justify a fee that rarely goes down. For a notes pile you skim weekly, that’s a bad bet.
- Notes behind a login. When the thing you wrote can’t be read without an internet connection and a working account, your own grocery list now has uptime requirements.
If your app is fine on all three, keep it. Genuinely. The point was never to make you switch — it was to make you check.
Verdict
The paid note apps are good software solving real problems, and most people are not those problems. Before you renew, ask what the subscription does that a folder, an editor, and one search command don’t.
Because that’s the bar now. The bar for beating a paid note-taking app is a folder.