Launching today
Cimanote
The fast, clean note app Evernote used to be
99 followers
The fast, clean note app Evernote used to be
99 followers
Evernote tripled prices, gutted the free tier to 1 device, and got slower every update. Enough was enough. Cimanote is the note app Evernote used to be: fast, clean, no bloat. Instant load · All devices · Rich editor · Evernote import (notes, notebooks, tags, attachments, all intact) · Real-time collaboration · Your data, always exportable. First year is completely free for our first 500 users. No card required. Then $6/mo, no surprises, ever. — Blagoja, founder
Congrats @blagoja. Excited to give this a shot. Similar to others I have abandoned Evernote as it wasn't living up to my expectations and reverted back to my old Notes app on my macbook. With these big name products you always find lack of support, lack of new feature etc. I have done a similar thing with a fitness/food tracker app, just tired of all the ones that showed promise but never lived up to expectations.
@brent_kendall Thank you, Brent. And welcome, you're going to feel right at home here.
What you described is exactly the pattern that kills great products. They start with a clear purpose, gain traction, and then the pressure to grow revenue at all costs slowly hollows out everything that made them good in the first place. Support gets worse, features get paywalled, the app gets heavier. You stop being a user and start being a revenue line.
The fact that you built your own fitness tracker tells me you get it at a deeper level than most. Sometimes, the only way to get what you actually want is to build it yourself. That's exactly how Cimanote started.
Would love to hear what you think after you try it. And if anything feels off or missing, my inbox is open. That feedback is genuinely how we get better.
Product Hunt
@curiouskitty Really good question and one that cuts straight to the core of what makes or breaks a note app long term.
Right now, full-text search across all your notes is fast and reliable. That was non-negotiable from day one. You can find anything you've written instantly.
The honest tradeoffs: PDF content search and image OCR are on the roadmap but not in the current version. I made the deliberate call to ship a search experience that works perfectly for the core use case rather than ship a broader search that works inconsistently. Slow or unreliable search is worse than no search, it loses trust fast.
Attachment search is the next milestone on that front. The architecture is designed to support it without compromising speed as we layer it in.
If full PDF and image OCR search is a dealbreaker for your workflow right now, I'd rather be upfront about that than have you find out after migrating. But if you primarily search your written notes, you'll find it fast and solid.
Simple and effective. The essential element done well at a fair price.
Any plans to support dictation / transcription integration?
@d_r8
Thank you. That's exactly what we're going for. Simple done well beats complex done poorly every time.
Dictation and transcription are on the roadmap. No hard date yet. I'd rather be honest about that than overpromise. But the fact that you're asking tells me it's worth prioritizing. Are you thinking voice notes on mobile specifically, or meeting transcription as well?
Really appreciate the honesty and transparency here, @blagoja Blagoja. It’s rare to see a founder lay out the pain points that motivated the build so clearly. The Evernote import and device-unlimited approach are subtle but huge quality-of-life wins that often get overlooked in note taking apps.
Curious how did you balance speed and feature completeness during the soft launch? So often a fast, clean experience gets compromised by trying to do too much too soon.
@onitedesigns Thanks so much, really appreciate that. And great question, it gets to the heart of every early product decision.
Honestly, the answer is ruthless prioritization. The most important question is/was: Does it make notes faster or slower to create and find? If a feature didn't have a clear answer to that, it didn't make the cut for launch.
The Evernote import was non-negotiable from day one. If people can't bring their history with them, nothing else matters. Devices support, same thing. Those aren't features. They're table stakes for anyone switching.
I did add some cool stuff like public note sharing and real-time collaboration, but that came towards the end, once the basics were in.
Everything else, integrations, AI features, is on the roadmap but deliberately not here yet. A fast, clean core experience that works reliably beats a bloated feature set that occasionally impresses you.
The risk I accepted is that some people will try it and say "where's X?" That's fine. I'd rather hear that than ship X and watch the app slow down because of it.
Speed is a feature. It's actually the hardest one to maintain as you grow, which is probably why Evernote lost it.
@blagoja This approach makes so much sense! Prioritizing speed and reliability over feature.
@onitedesigns Exactly. And the hardest part is holding that line as the feature requests pile up, which they already are. That's the real test. 😄 Thanks for the kind words Emmanuel, really appreciate the engagement today.
Interesting space — how do you see Cimanote positioned vs Notion (flexibility) and Apple Notes (simplicity)? Where do you want to win long-term?
@saurabh80 Great question and one I think about a lot.
Notion is a powerful tool but it's become a platform, not a note app. It's incredible for teams building wikis and databases but it's overkill for someone who just wants to capture and find their thoughts fast. The flexibility is also the tax, you spend time configuring Notion instead of using it.
Apple Notes is the opposite. Dead simple, which is why hundreds of millions of people use it. But it's an Apple-only story, and the moment you want to collaborate, share, or do anything beyond basic formatting, you hit a ceiling fast.
Cimanote wants to win the middle. People who outgrew Apple Notes but don't want to become a Notion architect just to take notes. Fast and clean like Apple Notes, capable and cross-platform like Notion, without being either one.
Long term, the win condition is simple: when someone asks "what do you use for notes?" the answer is Cimanote without hesitation. Not because it does everything, but because it does the right things exceptionally well.
That's the mountain worth climbing. 🏔️
the evernote migration being painless is huge honestly. that's the biggest barrier for most people switching note apps, you've got years of stuff in there and nobody wants to spend a weekend cleaning up broken formatting. the no device limits thing is also a great move, locking free users to one device felt like such a cash grab by evernote. how does the rich editor handle things like tables and code blocks?
@mihir_kanzariya You nailed it. Migration anxiety is the silent killer of every note app that tries to take on Evernote. People don't talk about it enough. It's not that they love Evernote, it's that leaving feels expensive. We wanted to make that cost zero.
On the rich editor, code blocks are in, fully supported with syntax highlighting. Tables are on the roadmap and honestly moving up the priority list fast based on how often it comes up. If tables are a dealbreaker for you right now I'd rather be upfront about that than have you find out after migrating.
What's your primary use case, personal notes, technical docs, or something else? Helps me understand how hard to push tables up the list.