Building Harbor in public

Last week I published the letter that explains why Harbor exists. It makes big promises. Nine of them, in a numbered list, signed with my name.

Promises are cheap in this category. Evernote’s slogan was “remember everything,” and for a while it meant it. Then the company changed hands, and the people who made the promise were no longer the people keeping it. Everyone who lived through that learned the same lesson: don’t trust the pitch.

So here’s the problem we have to solve before we solve any technical one. Why should you believe us?

You shouldn’t. Not yet. Trust isn’t something a new product gets to claim. It has to be earned, slowly, in public, where you can check the work. The only way I know to do that is to build where you can see us. So that’s the plan: Harbor is being built in public.

What that means

This blog chronicles the road to launch. From now until we open the doors, we’ll write about what we’re building and why: the Evernote import path, how search works, what our pricing promise actually says, the decisions we’ve made on purpose and the ones we’ve reversed. When we launch, the archive will be here, dated, so you can see whether what we said in May matched what we shipped.

We tell you what’s done and what isn’t. When something works today, we’ll say so plainly. When something is coming, we’ll say “at launch” and mean it. You will not find us marketing a feature that doesn’t exist. That rule is boring, and it’s the whole ballgame.

The price promise is public. $9.99 a month or $99 a year. We won’t raise your price for three years, and after that never more than 10% a year. That’s not a feature hidden in the code; it’s a commitment, written down where everyone can see it, so you can quote it back at us. It lives on our pricing page, and I’ll write a full post about it before launch.

We show our work, including the mistakes. We’ve already changed our minds about things, and we will again. When we do, we’ll say what changed and why, rather than quietly rewriting the page.

What it doesn’t mean

Building in public is not a reality show, and it’s not design by committee. Harbor is a personal product with a strong point of view: personal, never enterprise. No built-in AI, ever, on purpose. Simple over clever. We read every piece of feedback, and then we decide, and we tell you why. A second brain that tries to be everything to everyone becomes Evernote’s last decade.

It also doesn’t mean shipping half-finished software to look busy. The app exists and works; I drafted this post in it. Building in public is about honesty in the telling, not chaos in the making.

Why this category, especially

Nobody switches note apps lightly. Your second brain holds years of your life, and moving it feels like moving houses. After what happened to Evernote, people in this category don’t need another pitch. They need receipts. A track record. Evidence, accumulated over time, that the people behind the product say true things.

A blog can’t prove we’ll be trustworthy in year ten. But it can start the clock. Every dated post is a small commitment we can be held to, and a pile of kept commitments is the only thing trust has ever been made of.

Where things stand today

Honestly, further along than you might guess. The native Mac app is real and fast. The iPhone and iPad apps work. The web app runs fully offline. The Evernote importer brings your notebooks across with a progress bar you can watch. The web clipper clips, and there’s a command-line tool for the people who want one. What remains is the unglamorous last stretch: polish, edge cases, billing plumbing, the details nobody tweets about. We’re heads-down on that stretch now, aiming to open in August 2026.

If you’d like to follow along, this blog is the place, and the home page has a list you can join. And when the doors open, you’ll be able to start free at Harbor and check our work for yourself.