Thank you, teachers — Harbor is $35 a year

School starts in a couple of weeks.

Which means that right now, in buildings with the air conditioning still off, a few million people are moving desks around for the fourth time, rewriting a syllabus that was already fine, and quietly buying supplies with their own money because the budget didn’t stretch. Again.

So before the year gets away from everyone: thank you. And here’s something concrete to go with the sentiment.

Harbor Unlimited is $35 a year for teachers — instead of $99 — and it stays $35 for five years.

Why teachers

Partly because it’s a decent thing to do and we can afford to do it. But mostly because teachers are almost exactly the person Harbor was built for.

Think about what a teaching career actually produces. Lesson plans. The handout you rewrote three times before it finally worked. Rubrics, seating charts, the good version of the lab you fixed in year four. A photo of the whiteboard. The permission slip you’ll need to find again in April, and the parent email thread you’d very much like to still have in June. PD certificates, observation notes, the folder of student work you kept because it was extraordinary.

That isn’t a note-taking problem. It’s an archive — built one year at a time, worth more the longer it exists — and most of it was never typed text. It’s paper, photos, PDFs, and scans.

Which is the part Harbor is unusually good at. It reads the words inside all of it, so a stack of scanned handouts is searchable exactly like typed notes are. Snap the whiteboard in June and find it the following March by what was written on it. Harbor holds the whole mess of a real teaching year, not just the tidy parts.

Your work should outlive your login

There’s a second reason, and it’s the one that actually bothers us.

Most teachers’ material lives in an account somebody else owns. Change districts and it’s gone — or you spend a frantic week before your last day dragging a decade of work out of an account that’s about to be switched off.

Harbor is personal, never enterprise. We don’t sell to districts, we’ll never be an IT rollout, and there’s no admin console anywhere with a button that turns your notes off. Your Harbor is yours. It changes schools when you do, it survives a career change, and it’s still there when you retire.

That’s also why, when you claim the discount, we’ll tell you not to use your school email for the account itself. Sign up with a personal address you intend to keep. We only need the school address on the message you send us.

How to get it

Email help@harbor.my from your school email address and tell us where you teach. That’s the whole process. A real person reads it and writes back with a coupon code — no form to fill in, no third-party verification service, no uploading a photo of your badge to a company you’ve never heard of.

A few practical notes:

• It’s good for five years, then it rolls onto the regular price. Email us again at that point and we’ll extend it. Renewing shouldn’t be harder than qualifying was.
• Nothing is held back. $35 buys the same Harbor everyone else gets: every app, unlimited notes and devices, OCR search, encryption, the Web Clipper, the API and CLI. This isn’t a stripped-down education tier.
• Redeem the code on the web, at app.harbor.my — here’s exactly where the coupon box hides. Codes can’t be entered in the App Store or Google Play versions, which is Apple’s and Google’s rule rather than ours. Subscribe on the web, then sign in on your phone; it’ll already be Unlimited.
• No school email? Email us anyway and tell us the situation. We are not running a verification department.

The full details live in Is there a teacher discount?

Who counts as a teacher

If a school pays you, you count. K–12, university, community college, trade school, preschool. Full-time, part-time, adjunct, substitute. Librarians, aides, counselors, coaches, TAs, front-office staff — we are not going to litigate a job title.

Homeschooling parents, private tutors, and anyone teaching outside a traditional school: email us and tell us what you do. The answer is almost always yes.

The pinky promise

All we ask is that you use Harbor at least a little bit for school. That’s the entire eligibility test, and it runs on the honor system.

What’s in the rest of your notebooks is genuinely none of our business. Unit plans and a fishing log. Grading rubrics and a running tally of your poker nights. Forty recipes, the remodel quotes, every stock you’re definitely-not-going-to-buy, and one staff meeting. Use it for whatever you like — nobody here is auditing anybody’s notes. We can’t read the encrypted ones at all, and we’re not about to go poking through the rest.

On that: if some of what you keep is sensitive — anything with a student’s name on it, say — Harbor can lock individual notes with encryption only you can open. We’ll be straight about the trade-off, because we always are: an encrypted note drops out of search and OCR. So lock the handful of things that need locking, and leave the rest fully searchable.

Students get the discount too

Same $35, same process: email us from your school address and we’ll send a code. The difference is that a student’s runs a year at a time — email us again next year and we’ll extend it, for as long as you’re in school.

Why five years for teachers and one for students? Because you’ll only be a student for a few of them, and because if we’re going to hand somebody a long, quiet, no-paperwork commitment, it should be the person teaching the same class better for the twelfth time.

And students, take the same advice about your email: put your Harbor on an address you’ll still have after graduation. School accounts have a way of evaporating a few months after you walk.

About the money, honestly

$35 is a real price, not a first-year hook. It renews at $35 for the whole five years, and there is no step-up buried in the third paragraph of an email — our price promise covers this the same as everything else.

And if you stop paying, at any point, for any reason? Your notes don’t get held over you. The account goes read-only and export always works. That matters more than usual to someone whose life’s work is in there. A summer where money is tight should never cost you eleven years of lesson plans.

If Harbor turns out not to be your thing, there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee on the discounted price too. Email us and it’s done.

Everyone reading this can name a teacher. Not the subject — the person. The one who noticed something, or refused to give up on a version of you that hadn’t shown up yet.

We can’t pay that back. So here’s the small version instead: the tool is $35, the archive is yours, and nobody gets to switch it off.

Have a good year. Start free whenever you’re ready, and email us for the code.