I could not compromise with a product that would charge me $5 more a month just to have it running on an additional device, especially when the product itself didn't look that solid to me. Moreover, Evernote experienced data losses, security breaches, and privacy controversies that, in my eyes, made it unfit to handle something as precious as the notes from my life and my work. Evernote had a primitive API, a primitive web clipper, no Linux client, and, as it tried harder and harder to monetize its product, it put more and more features behind expensive tiers. If Evernote was supposed to be my second brain, then it should have been very simple to synchronize it with my filesystem and across multiple devices, but that wasn't as simple as it sounds. I have been a happy Evernote user until ~5-6 years ago when I realized that the company had run out of ideas, and I could no longer compromise with its decisions.

All of this content used to be sparse across many devices, it was painful to sync, and then Evernote came like water in a desert. By then, I already had tons of bookmarks, text files with read-it-later links, notes I had taken across multiple devices, sketches I had taken on physical paper, and drafts of articles or papers I was working on. When Evernote launched the idea of an online notebook as a sort of 'second brain' more than a decade ago, it resonated so much with what I had been trying to achieve for a while.

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