Fed up with Evernote's Greed, Indie Dev Ships Cimanote to Steal Their Lunch Money

If you've been a long-time Evernote user, you're probably pulling your hair out lately. Unjustified price hikes, bloated updates, and an app that eats RAM like Chrome on steroids. Well, one absolute madman finally got pissed off enough to code a direct punch to Evernote's face.

The Backstory: How to Piss Off a Dev Enough to Build a Competitor

So here's the tea. The founder, Blagoja, was a loyal Evernote user for years. But then Evernote started pulling some classic corporate BS:

• Tripled their prices because why not?
• Gutted the free tier, locking users down to a single device.
• Cycled through 3 CEOs in two years while the app became an incredibly slow, bloated mess.

After complaining into the void, Blagoja said "screw it" and built Cimanote. It's essentially what Evernote used to be: fast, clean, and BS-free.

This new contender has some killer selling points aimed right at Evernote's jugular:

• Zero Friction Migration: Imports your entire Evernote life—notes, notebooks, tags, formatting, and yes, all attachments (PDFs, audio, you name it). No weekend cleanup needed.
• No Device Limits: Desktop, mobile, tablet—use it everywhere, for free.
• PWA Magic: It installs directly from the browser like a native app. Goodbye, App Store tax.
• Honest Pricing: The first year is completely free for the first 500 users. After that? $6/mo, with a blood oath of no surprise price hikes ever.

The Product Hunt Tribunal Speaks

The PH comment section is a goldmine right now. Here are the hottest takes from the community:

1. Curing "Migration Anxiety": Let's be real. People aren't sticking with Evernote because they love it; they're stuck because they have a decade of PDFs and audio files held hostage. Cimanote grabbing all attachments flawlessly is the real MVP move here. It makes the switching cost zero.

2. The Smart Feature Trade-off: Someone grilled the founder about advanced search (PDFs/OCR). Blagoja straight up admitted: "I deliberately shipped a text search that works perfectly rather than a broader search that works inconsistently." Speed and reliability over buggy bloatware. That's some senior dev wisdom right there.

3. Native-level PWA: People are genuinely shocked that a PWA (Progressive Web App) can feel so native on Mac and Windows. It's a slick move to ship fast across all platforms without dealing with Apple's or Google's walled gardens.

C4F's Takeaway: Keep It Simple, Stupid

From a dev's perspective, Blagoja's strategy is absolutely brilliant. He understands the core philosophy of a good tool: "Get out of the user's way."

His three non-negotiables are a masterclass for anyone building a SaaS:

1. Speed is a promise, not a feature.
2. Pricing integrity—no shady moves.
3. Your data is yours—export anywhere, anytime.

Stop trying to stuff useless AI features into a note app just to justify VC funding. Do one thing and do it flawlessly. By the way, if this inspires you to build your own giant-slayer SaaS, do us all a favor and host it on a reliable cloud vps, not a potato server in your basement.

Source: Product Hunt - Cimanote