Why we're building Harbor

This is the first post on the Harbor blog, so it should answer the first question anyone will ask: why build another notes app?

The honest answer is that I didn’t want to. I wanted the one I already had to keep its promise.

The promise that broke

You spent years building a second brain.

Every note. Every scanned bill and contract. Your kid’s drawings, the report cards, the recording of the meeting you’ll need three years from now. You handed it all to Evernote because it promised to keep it safe, forever.

Then Evernote was sold to a private-equity firm. The price nearly doubled. Most of the staff was let go. Bugs piled up and stayed. They bolted on an AI nobody asked for and used it to justify charging you more. The fast, native app became slow, heavy software that pins your CPU and feels like a web page wearing a costume. And your notes, years of your life, still sit on their servers in plain text, where any employee could read them.

That’s not a second brain. That’s a hostage situation.

And the cruel part is that leaving means abandoning everything you trusted it with.

I know that feeling from the inside. I have used Evernote for years. My whole life is in there. I kept paying not because the product was getting better, but because the cost of leaving felt higher than the cost of staying. That is not loyalty. That is gravity.

We think the original promise was right. One private place for your whole digital life. Something you own. Something that lasts decades. Someone just has to actually keep that promise.

So we’re building Harbor.

What a harbor is for

To harbor something is to hold it, keep it, shelter it. That’s the whole product.

Harbor your thoughts. Harbor your documents. Harbor your everything.

Nine commitments

Here’s what you deserve, and what Harbor is built to do:

1. It’s yours. A personal second brain, not a company’s. No teams, no enterprise pivot. Your data is yours forever — never sold, never mined, never held over your head.
2. It’s everything, not just notes. Scanned mail, PDFs, receipts, drawings, meeting recordings — captured, kept, and searchable to the word with real OCR. Even your handwriting.
3. It follows you. Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android. Switch anything, lose nothing. A second brain has to outlive whatever device you’re holding today.
4. It won’t clog your computer. Your brain grows for decades. We keep it in the cloud and sync down only what you need, so it never eats your hard drive.
5. It’s simple. Notebooks and notes — the model you already understand. No markdown to learn, no clever tag system to fight.
6. It’s private. Strong encryption, built in, for the notes and files you want no one to ever see. Not even us.
7. Bring your own AI. You already have one you trust. Connect it and let it search, add, and organize your Harbor. We won’t force a worse one on you to pad the bill.
8. A price you can trust. We won’t raise your price for three years. After that, never more than 10% a year. In writing — because you’ve been burned before.
9. You’re never held hostage. Stop paying and your memories don’t vanish; they stay, read-only, free. And you can take everything with you anytime — open export, a real API, your own AI. We want you to stay because Harbor is good, not because you’re trapped.

One honest note on number six, because honesty is the whole point of this letter. Encryption in Harbor is a lock you choose to turn on, per note or per notebook. It is not the default state of your account. When you encrypt something, we truly cannot read it, and that cuts both ways: an encrypted note drops out of OCR, out of search, and out of reach of any AI you connect. So you lock down the sensitive things, and everything else stays fully powered. We will always tell you the trade-off plainly, here and everywhere else.

What we’re not chasing

We’re not chasing an exit. We’re building the place we want to keep our own lives in, for the rest of our lives. Rock-solid, native, and meant to still be here in twenty years. We’d like you to keep your life here too.

Harbor is not a slide deck. The apps exist and they work; my own notes live in Harbor now. We’re heads-down finishing the details, and this blog will follow the work until the doors open. If you want the longer story of what we’re building and how it answers each of the nine commitments, it lives at why Harbor.

Anchored. Private. Yours.

If any of this sounds like the second brain you’ve been waiting for, you can start free at Harbor whenever you’re ready, and hold us to every word above.