Our price promise

Money is where trust gets tested. A notes app can say anything about privacy and permanence, but the pricing page is where you find out who a company thinks you are: a customer, or a captive.

So before we launch, we’re writing our pricing promise down in public, in a dated post we can’t quietly edit away. Here it is.

The price

Harbor is one plan: $9.99 a month, or $99 a year (about 17% less). Everything included. There’s a free tier to start, so you can move your notes in and live with Harbor before paying anything.

No “personal versus professional” ladder, no features held back to force an upgrade, and no teams-and-enterprise menu, because Harbor is a personal product and always will be.

The promise

Three commitments, in plain words:

1. We won’t raise your price for three years. The price you subscribe at is your price. Not “current promotional pricing,” not “subject to change.” Three years, minimum, untouched.
2. After that, never more than 10% a year. If costs genuinely rise over the long run, an increase will be small, slow, and announced. Never a doubling. Never a surprise on your renewal receipt.
3. You’re never held hostage. If you stop paying, your notes don’t vanish and they aren’t ransomed back to you. Your account becomes read-only, free, and export always works: ENEX, HTML, ZIP, or a full account export, anytime. Leaving Harbor is always allowed to be easy.

Why we’re writing it down

Because a promise that lives in a founder’s head is worth nothing, and we’re asking people who’ve been burned before.

If you came from Evernote, you watched this happen in slow motion. Personal was $69.99 a year. After the private-equity sale it went to $129.99 — an 86% jump, on data that couldn’t easily leave.

Then the plans were renamed. The entry tier is now called Starter, at $99 a year, which reads like the price came back down. It didn’t. Starter caps you at 1,000 notes. The plan that holds an unlimited library — the thing $69.99 used to buy — is Advanced, at $249.99 a year.

So the honest comparison isn’t 86%. It’s $69.99 to $249.99 for the same thing you already had. Roughly three and a half times, in about three years, on notes you’d spent a decade putting there.

The lesson wasn’t “prices go up.” The lesson was that the price of a service can be raised specifically because leaving is hard. Your years of notes became leverage. That’s the dynamic we’re promising, in writing, never to use.

We should be honest about what kind of thing this promise is. It isn’t a feature in the code; there’s no function that enforces it. It’s a commitment by the people who run the company, which is exactly why it needs to be public and dated. This post is your receipt. If we ever break it, quote it back at us, loudly.

We put a copy in your account, too. Every new Harbor starts with two notes, and the second one is this promise, written out and dated the day you joined. It’s a note like any other: yours to edit, keep, export, or screenshot. If we ever break it, you won’t have to come find this page. The evidence is already sitting in your own library.

Why we can afford it

A promise like this is only credible if the business underneath it makes sense, so here’s the shape of ours.

Harbor is built by a small team, kept deliberately simple, with no enterprise sales motion and no growth-at-all-costs plan that needs rescuing later. We charge money, plainly, because storing your files, running OCR, and syncing your devices costs money, and we’d rather be paid by you than monetize you. No ads, no selling data, no mining your notes. The subscription is the whole business model, so it’s priced to be sustainable from the start rather than cheap now and painful later.

We’re also not chasing an exit. The failure mode this category knows too well starts with a sale to someone whose spreadsheet says your loyalty can absorb a price hike. We’re building Harbor to run for decades, and this promise is meant to read like it.

The other half of the promise

Notice that commitment number three is what makes the first two honest. A price cap from a company that traps your data is just a slower squeeze. It’s the open door, the export that always works, the account that goes read-only instead of dark, that keeps us disciplined. If Harbor stops being worth $9.99 a month, you can leave in an afternoon, and we have to live with that. We think that’s exactly the pressure a company holding your second brain should be under.

The promise lives permanently on our pricing page, and the rest of the thinking behind Harbor is at why Harbor. When we open the doors in August 2026, you can start free, and the price you see is the one we just promised to protect.