Why Unbent exists

An archive, not a notebook

I started with Evernote in 2011. By the time I left, the account held about 13,000 notes, most of them paper: receipts, bills, manuals, letters, whole filing cabinets fed through a scanner. Evernote read the text in every scan, so a bill could be found by what it said. Paper went in, became searchable, and went in the recycling.

Nothing in an archive like that can be made again, most of it will never be opened, and one day one of them matters. What I was paying for was that it would be there.

What changed

November 2022

Evernote announces its sale to Bending Spoons, an app company in Milan.

February 2023

The new owner lays off 129 people, saying the product had been unprofitable for years.

July 2023

Nearly all of the remaining staff in the United States and Chile are laid off, and the product moves to a team in Europe.

December 2023

A free account is capped at fifty notes in one notebook.

November 2025

The Personal and Professional plans are retired for Starter, $99 a year with a 1,000-note cap, and Advanced, $249.99 a year with no cap, which existing subscribers are offered at renewal.

None of this is unusual. A company bought a product that was losing money and set about making it pay. What is easy to miss from the outside is who paid.

What one account paid

What my account paid each September:

$45 a year for five years, $70 for six. The first renewal after the sale cost $8 more; the next nearly doubled. Then, in August 2026, the mail came:

We are sending you this email to inform you that your yearly Evernote subscription will renew in 30 days for 249.99 USD.

Two doublings in three years, for the same notes. The price could do that because an archive of 13,000 scans is the thing you cannot move on a whim, and it was hard to move because only one app could read it.

What I went looking for

I looked for somewhere to take it before deciding to build. The archive needed three things:

• A note that holds several files and tags.
• Search that reads the text inside a scanned PDF.
• A hosted service, so it is on the phone and the laptop without a server of my own.

Notion has the note but, when I looked, did not search inside an attached PDF. Obsidian lives on your own device and is not hosted. The Evernote alternative I wanted was the one that had just doubled its price.

What Unbent promises instead

The conclusion is the whole design of Unbent: if you pay someone to keep your notes, they still have to be yours, with or without them.

• Markdown, byte for byte. A note is a Markdown file, saved exactly as typed: no reflowed lists, no italics quietly rewritten, no escaped characters appearing overnight. A format the app rewrites behind your back is one you do not own.
• An export that needs no Unbent. One folder per note, its Markdown and files beside it. Read it, grep it, back it up, open it in anything, as often as you like.
• A way in from Evernote. An export goes in whole, from the browser: every note keeps its notebook, tags, dates and scans, and the text in every scan is searchable again. That is what export Evernote to Markdown should mean: Markdown, not another silo.
• The code, if you ever need it. Unbent is source-available and runs on Cloudflare's free tier. If this service ever goes the way that one did, run it yourself.

What that promise costs us

If you stop paying, nothing is held hostage: the account turns read-only, and every note still opens, searches and exports. Your archive is never the reason to renew. Unbent has to earn each year on what it does.

Your notes, unbent.