Harbor

Does Harbor have built-in AI?

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No. Harbor has no built-in AI — and that’s a decision, not a gap.

Here’s the thinking. You likely already pay for ChatGPT, Claude, or something like them, and they are better than anything a notes company would bolt on. We also watched Evernote graft on a proprietary AI and lean on it to justify price increases. We’re not doing that: no AI assistant baked in, no “smart” features running over your notes, no AI line item hiding in your bill.

Does Harbor work offline?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yes — fully. Offline isn’t a degraded mode in Harbor; it’s how the apps are built.

Every app keeps a real database on your device. The Mac, iPhone, and iPad apps carry a complete local mirror of your notes, including a search index. The web app does something rarer: it keeps an actual SQLite database inside your browser and installs as an app, so it works offline the same way the native apps do.

Getting started

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The Harbor API is a standard REST API over HTTPS. Requests and responses are JSON. You authenticate with a personal access token (for your own scripts) or an OAuth app (for integrations other people install). There’s also a first-class command-line tool and an agent skill for your AI.

Base URL

All API requests go to:

https://app.harbor.my/api/v1

The API is versioned in the path (/api/v1). We’ll add new versions rather than break this one.

How do I import from Evernote?

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Harbor imports Evernote’s ENEX files directly.

In Evernote, export your notes as .enex files — the desktop apps can export a notebook at a time.
In Harbor (web app or Mac app), open the importer and choose your .enex files.
Watch the live progress. Harbor shows exactly how far along it is — “42 of 900” — and large imports keep running in the background while you do other things.

Your notebooks, stacks, tags, checklists, attachments, and web clips all come across — the details are in What comes across in an Evernote import?

How do I scan a document?

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Use the iPhone or iPad app — your phone is the scanner.

Create a note (or open one) and choose the document scan option.
Point the camera at the page. Harbor uses Apple’s document-scanning engine, so edges are detected automatically and the page is straightened and cleaned up for you.
Add more pages if you have them, then save. The scan lands in your note.

Here’s the part that makes scanning worth doing: after the scan syncs, Harbor’s server runs OCR on it. A little while later, every legible word in that document is searchable — and when a search hits, the viewer highlights the exact word right on the page. Scan the furnace warranty today, search “heat exchanger” in three years, and Harbor opens the page with the phrase lit up. More on that in How does OCR search work?

How do notebooks and tags work?

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Harbor uses the system you already know: notebooks, stacks, and tags.

Notebooks hold notes. Every note lives in exactly one notebook, and each notebook shows a count of what’s inside. Stacks group related notebooks — a “Home” stack might hold Receipts, Warranties, and Projects.

Tags cut across notebooks. A note lives in one notebook but can wear many tags, which is what makes them good for themes that span your whole library — taxes, travel, 2026. Harbor’s tags are hierarchical, up to three levels deep (travel > europe > portugal), and you can drag a tag to re-parent it.

How do passkeys and 2FA work?

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Harbor supports passkeys and two-factor authentication — use whichever fits how you like to sign in.

Passkeys

A passkey replaces your password entirely. Your device holds a cryptographic key, and signing in is just Face ID, Touch ID, or your device passcode. There’s nothing to type and nothing to phish — a fake sign-in page can’t steal a passkey, because there’s no secret to hand over. Passkeys sync through iCloud Keychain, 1Password, and similar managers, so your other devices can use them too. Add one from your account’s security settings.

How does encryption work in Harbor?

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Encryption in Harbor is optional — a lock you choose to use, note by note. It’s off by default, and most of your library probably shouldn’t use it.

When you encrypt a note, your device seals it before it leaves: your passphrase runs through Argon2id to derive a key, and the note is encrypted with AES-256-GCM. Our servers only ever store the sealed result. We never hold your keys — that’s what zero-knowledge means. Nobody at Cloudmanic can read an encrypted note. Not support, not us on our worst day.

How does OCR search work?

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When you add an image, scan, or PDF to a note, Harbor’s server runs OCR — optical character recognition — on it. It reads the text in the file and records where each word sits on the page.

That does two things for you:

Search sees inside your files. A search for “furnace” finds the warranty PDF and the photo of the serial-number sticker — not just notes where you typed the word yourself.
Matches are highlighted in place. Open the attachment from a search result and Harbor highlights the exact word right on the page, so you’re never left skimming a forty-page scan for the one line that matched.

There’s nothing to turn on and nothing extra to pay for. Capture normally — scan a page, snap a photo, drag in a PDF, or let a watched folder import a whole stack for you — and the indexing happens in the background on our servers. It even covers attachments your device hasn’t downloaded, so search stays complete without filling your disk.

OAuth & Tokens API

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This page is the full reference for Harbor’s authentication surface: the OAuth2 token endpoint (every grant type), the Authorization Code + PKCE flow, the scope catalog, token revocation, logout, registration, personal access tokens (PATs), and the developer registry for OAuth apps and their user grants. For a guided introduction, start with Authentication; the scope vocabulary applies everywhere below.

The Harbor CLI

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harbor is a small, dependency-light Go binary that exposes the entire Harbor API as composable commands: notebooks, notes, hierarchical tags, full-text and OCR search, file attachments, sync, version history, trash, templates, reminders, public sharing, client-side encryption, and Evernote import/export. Every command takes --json, so it drops straight into a pipeline.

It’s open source: github.com/HarborMyNotes/harbor-cli (MIT).

Install

Homebrew (macOS & Linux)

The repo is its own tap:

brew tap HarborMyNotes/harbor https://github.com/HarborMyNotes/harbor-cli
brew install harbor

Update later with brew upgrade harbor.

What happens if I stop paying?

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Your account goes read-only. That’s it — no deletion, no ransom note.

Read-only means you can still open the apps and read every note you’ve ever made. And — this is the part that matters — export and delete keep working. A lapsed account can export everything as HTML or Evernote ENEX, exactly like a paying one, and can delete anything, up to and including the whole account. Your data is never leverage.

What is Harbor?

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Harbor is a private, cross-platform second brain — a modern take on what Evernote used to be. It keeps your notes, notebooks, tags, tasks, and reminders in one place, on every device, and it works fully offline.

You can capture almost anything: typed notes, scanned documents, photos, web clips, audio recordings, and handwriting. Harbor runs OCR on your attachments, so search finds words inside photos and scanned PDFs — not just in the text you typed.

Which browsers does the Web Clipper support?

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The Web Clipper supports Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari — all four at launch.

It’s one extension codebase built for all of them, so you get the same clipper everywhere: the same four capture formats, the same annotation tools, the same save flow. If you clip in Chrome at work and Safari at home, nothing changes but the browser chrome around it.

How do I encrypt or decrypt a single note?

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Encryption in Harbor is per note, and you can change your mind about any note at any time. A note keeps its notebook, its tags, its attachments and its reminders through either direction — only how it’s stored changes.

Its version history is the one exception, and it’s a permanent one: changing a note’s encryption deletes the note’s earlier versions, whichever direction you go. What that means, and how to keep what you need, below.

Can an app or AI read my encrypted notes?

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No — and not because we’ve told them not to. There’s nothing readable for us to hand over.

When you encrypt a note, your own device scrambles it before it’s sent. Harbor’s servers store only the scrambled version, and they hold nothing that can unscramble it. So when you approve an app, create a Personal Access Token, or connect an AI assistant, your encrypted notes simply aren’t available to it. That’s a property of how Harbor is built, not a rule we’re promising to follow.

Are the Harbor apps really native?

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Yes — really native, not “native” in the way the word gets stretched.

The Mac, iPhone, and iPad apps are written in SwiftUI, Apple’s own toolkit, with a deliberately tiny dependency footprint. There is no Electron, no embedded web page pretending to be an app. Behind them runs a fast Go server. Android gets its own native app, live on Google Play.

Authentication

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Every API request is authenticated with a bearer token in the Authorization header:

curl https://app.harbor.my/api/v1/notes \
 -H "Authorization: Bearer $HARBOR_TOKEN"

There are two kinds of token, for two different jobs.

Personal access tokens

A personal access token (PAT) is a long-lived key that acts as you. Use one for your own scripts, a cron job, a CLI, or a one-off integration. Tokens start with hbp_ and are scoped to exactly the permissions you pick.

Can Harbor record and transcribe meetings?

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Yes. Harbor records audio into a note, and turns it into a transcript you can search whenever you ask it to.

Recording fits the device you’re on:

Web and Mac — record your microphone and system audio together, so an online meeting playing through your speakers is captured alongside (or instead of) the room. Both sources are on unless you turn one off. In a browser you’ll be asked to pick a screen or tab to share when recording starts — choose one that has audio; on the Mac there’s nothing to pick, and you can flip either source on or off mid-recording.
Windows — microphone only.
iPhone and iPad — recording keeps running in the background while you use other apps, with a Live Activity (and Dynamic Island) showing that the recorder is going.
Android — a full-screen recorder with a live level meter, so you can see it’s picking you up.

Transcribing is something you ask for

Harbor does not transcribe recordings on its own. Once a recording has synced, a Transcribe button appears under it in the note — press it, and the transcript is built in the background while you get on with something else. A recording you only wanted as audio simply stays audio.

Can I export everything?

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Yes — everything, any time, in formats you can actually use. This is the core promise Harbor is built on.

How an export works

You press Export, we build the archive on our servers, and we email you a link when it’s ready.

So you don’t have to sit and watch a progress bar. Close Harbor, close the browser tab, shut the laptop — the export keeps building without you. A big library takes a while, and none of that is time you have to spend.

Can I search inside PDFs and photos?

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Yes. Searching inside files is one of the main reasons Harbor exists.

Every PDF, photo, scan, and image you put in a note is indexed by server-side OCR, so ordinary searches reach inside them:

The whiteboard photo from a planning session — search a phrase that was written on it.
A folder of scanned receipts — search the store name or an amount.
A contract PDF — search a clause, and Harbor highlights the exact line on the page.
The photo of a serial-number sticker you took in the crawl space — search part of the number.

It works for PDFs with real text and for image-only PDFs (like most scans) — those get OCR’d the same as photos. And it covers attachments your device hasn’t downloaded yet, because the index lives on the server.

Does Harbor support templates?

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Yes. Build a template once, then apply it whenever you create a new note.

Templates are made in the same editor you write notes in, so anything the editor can do, a template can hold: headings, checklists, tables (colored ones included), highlights, code blocks — whatever structure you repeat. Some that earn their keep quickly:

How do I connect ChatGPT or Claude to Harbor?

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You connect your AI through Harbor’s open surface — the CLI and agent skill today, plus an MCP server at launch.

The quickest path, if you use an AI coding assistant:

Create a Personal Access Token in Harbor. This is how your AI signs in as you — and you can revoke it any time.
Install the harbor CLI.
Run harbor skill install. It drops a self-contained agent skill into Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor that teaches the assistant to create, edit, richly format, organize, search, remind, and share notes.

From there, you just ask: “file these meeting notes into the Projects notebook and tag them follow-up,” and your assistant does it through the CLI.

How do I start free?

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You can use Harbor free — just create an account and start writing.

Grab Harbor for your platform from the download page, or use the web app right in your browser.
Create an account with your email, or sign in with Apple or Google.
Start capturing. Your notes sync to every device you sign in on.

Free accounts include a usage allowance. If you go over it, your account becomes read-only until you upgrade — you can still read, export, and delete everything, always. Nothing you put in Harbor is ever held hostage.

Notes API

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The notes endpoints cover the full lifecycle of a note: create, list with filters, fetch, partial update, append, PDF export, trash/delete, and the attachment-hash swap that powers client-side encryption. Every endpoint on this page requires a bearer token with the notes scope.

Notes are syncable records: every mutation allocates an update sequence number (USN) in the same transaction that writes the row, deletes are tombstones, and writes are last-write-wins (no locking — cross-device divergence is resolved by sync’s conflict copies). Mutations return {"note": {...}, "usn": n} so clients can advance their sync cursor; reads return the bare note object.

What can I clip with the Web Clipper?

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The clipper captures a page four ways, so you can keep exactly as much as you need:

Simplified article — the readable heart of the page, stripped of navigation, ads, and clutter. Best for articles you want to read and keep.
Full page — a freeze-dried snapshot of the whole page as it looked at that moment. When the site redesigns or the post disappears, your copy doesn’t.
Bookmark — a tidy card with the title, link, and preview. For when the pointer is enough.
Screenshot — capture a region you draw, or the full page (the clipper scrolls and stitches it for you), then mark it up in the annotation editor before saving.

Filing happens as you save, not later: pick the notebook, add tags (creating new ones on the fly), attach a comment to your future self, and optionally make the note public. No “sort the inbox” chore waiting for you afterward.

What comes across in an Evernote import?

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The core of your Evernote account comes across intact:

Notebooks and stacks — your structure is preserved, not flattened.
Tags — carried over and applied to the right notes.
Note content — text and formatting, including checklists.
Attachments — PDFs, images, scans, and other files travel with their notes.
Web clips — pages you clipped over the years come along too.

After the import, Harbor does something Evernote charged extra for: it runs OCR on your attachments, so the words inside your scanned documents and photos become searchable. Give a large library a little time to index — it happens on our servers, in the background.

What's the trade-off when I encrypt a note?

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When you encrypt a note, Harbor can no longer see its contents — and neither can any feature that depends on reading them.

Specifically, an encrypted note is excluded from:

Search — its text won’t appear in results.
OCR — attachments inside it aren’t indexed, so words in its scans and photos aren’t findable.
Spotlight and Handoff on Apple devices — the system never sees it.
The API, CLI, and MCP — which means your AI can’t see it either.

Those four are reversible: remove the note’s encryption and every one of them comes back. There’s a fifth cost that doesn’t work that way, and it’s the one to read before you act.

Will you raise the price?

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Here’s our promise, plainly: the price you sign up at is locked for three years. After that, any increase is capped at 10% per year. That’s a commitment we’re making to you — we publish it on the pricing page because we want to be held to it.

Today, Harbor Unlimited is $9.99 a month or $99 a year. One plan, everything included — there’s no premium tier waiting upstream to upsell you into.

How do I use a coupon code?

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Coupon codes are redeemed in the web app at app.harbor.my, inside the upgrade window. It’s tucked behind a small link, so here’s exactly where to click.

How is my data backed up?

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Your data lives in four separate places, all off-site, all encrypted at rest. If you use a desktop app, there’s a fifth copy sitting on your own hard drive.

Losing your notes is the one failure a second brain isn’t allowed to have. It’s the thing we engineered first, before features.

The four copies

1 and 2 — two live replicas. Your live data is replicated continuously to two different off-site servers. These are always current, always ready. If a machine dies, another one already has everything.

Can I annotate and redact web clips?

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Yes. When you take a screenshot clip, it opens in a full annotation editor before it’s saved.

The toolkit covers the marks people actually make:

Arrow — point at the thing that matters.
Box — frame a region.
Text — label it in words.
Highlight — draw attention without covering anything.
Pen — freehand, for everything else.
Crop — keep only the part you care about.
Undo/redo — while you’re editing, every move is reversible.

And then there’s redaction, which deserves its own paragraph. The pixelate tool is genuinely irreversible: it destroys the pixels underneath before the image is saved. It is not a black box layered on top that someone could peel off later, and not a blur that clever software might undo. Once you pixelate an account number and save, that information is gone from the image — which is exactly what a redaction tool should do, and surprisingly often isn’t.

Can I restore an old version of a note?

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Yes. Harbor keeps a version history for every note, and restoring is one click.

Open a note’s history and you can browse what it looked like at earlier points, then revert to any version. Each note also has an activity timeline, so you can see the story of a note — when it changed and how — before deciding to roll back.

Conventions

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Every endpoint in the API reference follows these rules. They’re documented here once instead of on every page.

JSON and field names

Requests and responses are JSON (Content-Type: application/json).
JSON field names are snake_case — notebook_id, created_at, source_url.
The token endpoint additionally accepts application/x-www-form-urlencoded, per the OAuth 2.0 spec.

Timestamps

All timestamps are UTC epoch milliseconds (integers):

{ "created_at": 1752600000000, "updated_at": 1752600000000 }

To convert:

# bash / GNU date
date -u -d @1752600000 # seconds → readable

from datetime import datetime, timezone
datetime.fromtimestamp(1752600000000 / 1000, tz=timezone.utc)

new Date(1752600000000).toISOString();

The one exception is OAuth’s expires_in, which is a duration in seconds (again, per the OAuth spec).

Does Harbor handle handwriting?

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Yes, in two ways.

Write with Apple Pencil

On iPad, Harbor has a sketch mode built for the Pencil. Pick a paper style, write or draw, and come back any time to keep editing — sketches stay editable, they’re not flattened into a picture the moment you close them. They live inside notes like any content, and you can export a sketch to PDF.

How do I delete my account and data?

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You can delete your account and everything in it whenever you choose. It’s your data; leaving completely is always on the table.

The sensible order:

Export first, if you want a copy. HTML or Evernote ENEX, and it doubles as your full GDPR copy — see Can I export everything? We build it on our servers and email you the link, so start it, then wait for that email before you delete. Deletion is permanent, so this is the step to be sure about.
Delete the account from your account settings. That removes your notes, notebooks, attachments, and account data.

A few things stated plainly:

How do refunds work?

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Harbor has a 30-day money-back guarantee. If it isn’t right for you, email help@harbor.my within 30 days of your purchase and we’ll refund you in full.

No forms, no phone tree, no convincing required. If you’d like to tell us why you’re leaving, we genuinely read it and it genuinely helps — but it’s not a condition of getting your money back.

Notebooks & Stacks API

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A notebook holds notes; a stack holds notebooks. Notes never live in a stack directly — the hierarchy is always note → notebook → stack. Every account has exactly one default notebook (new notes land there unless you say otherwise, and it can never be deleted).

All endpoints on this page require a bearer token with the notebooks scope.

What are the Harbor CLI and MCP server?

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They’re the two main ways to drive Harbor from outside the apps — by script, or by AI.

The `harbor` CLI

A command-line client that exposes the entire Harbor API: notes, notebooks, tags, search, reminders, templates, sharing — all of it. It’s built for automation the way a tool should be: every command takes --json and prints clean, machine-readable output; exit codes are stable; errors are structured. harbor openapi prints the full OpenAPI spec for anything that wants to learn the API wholesale.

What if I forget my encryption passphrase?

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We can’t recover it. That’s a hard answer, so here’s the honest reasoning behind it.

Harbor’s encryption is zero-knowledge: your passphrase never leaves your devices, and our servers store only sealed data they cannot read. There is no reset link, no support override, no back door. A door we could open for you would be a door someone else could open too — and then the encryption would be theater.

What platforms does Harbor run on?

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Harbor runs everywhere you work, and every surface syncs through one account.

Mac — a genuinely native SwiftUI app (no Electron), available from the Mac App Store or as a direct download with automatic updates.
iPhone and iPad — one universal native app, with widgets, Siri Shortcuts, document scanning, Apple Pencil handwriting, and Face ID lock.
Windows — a native app with x64 and ARM64 installers that update themselves.
Android — a native Android app on Google Play.
Web — a full offline-first app in your browser. It keeps a real database on your machine and installs as an app, so it works offline like the native ones. On Linux, this is how you run Harbor.
Web Clipper — a browser extension for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari, all four at launch. See which browsers the clipper supports.
CLI — the harbor command line puts the whole API at your fingertips, and it’s the foundation for bringing your own AI.

Whichever you pick, everything stays in sync — and everything works offline. Get the apps on the download page.

What search operators does Harbor support?

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Harbor speaks an Evernote-style search grammar. If you learned Evernote’s search, you already know Harbor’s.

Plain words — boiler manual finds notes containing both words.
“Quoted phrases” — "grand total" matches the exact phrase.
Exclusion — -draft leaves out notes containing “draft”.
tag: — tag:taxes narrows to a tag.
notebook: — notebook:Receipts narrows to a notebook.
intitle: — intitle:budget matches only in note titles.
resource: — narrows to notes carrying a certain kind of attachment.
Date ranges — find notes by when they were created or updated.
Wildcards — harb* matches words beginning with “harb”.
Website addresses — portlandcolocation.com finds notes you clipped from that site.

Operators combine naturally. A realistic example:

Will Harbor fill up my disk?

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No. Keeping your disk free is a stated design goal, not an accident.

Harbor’s model is simple: the cloud holds everything; your devices carry what you need. Your notes sync down so browsing, editing, and offline work are always possible, and thumbnails keep attachments browsable — but the heavy files themselves come down when you open them, not all at once, on every device, forever.

Will my notebooks and tags survive the import?

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Yes. Your organization is the part of your account you’ve put the most years into, so the importer treats it carefully.

Notebooks and stacks come across as notebooks and stacks. Harbor organizes exactly the way Evernote does — notes live in notebooks, notebooks group into stacks — so there’s nothing to re-learn and nothing gets flattened into one big pile.

Can I email notes into Harbor?

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Yes. At launch, Harbor includes email-to-note: your account gets a private address ending in @m.harbor.my. Send or forward an email to it, and it shows up in Harbor as a note.

It’s the lowest-friction capture there is — no app open, no clipper, no copy-paste. The receipt, the flight confirmation, the newsletter worth keeping, the long email you’ll want findable in five years: forward it and move on. It’s waiting in Harbor the next time you look.

Can I share a note with someone?

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Yes. You can publish any note as a public, read-only link.

The person you send it to just opens the link — no Harbor account, no sign-up wall. They see a clean page with the note’s content, and rich things render properly: PDFs are viewable, audio recordings play with their transcripts, web clips look like the pages they came from. Links unfurl nicely when pasted into messages, and you can see a view count on notes you’ve shared. Turn sharing off and the link stops working.

Errors

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Harbor uses conventional HTTP status codes and returns every error in a single JSON envelope, so you only have to handle one shape.

The error envelope

{
 "error": {
 "code": "validation_failed",
 "message": "The request was invalid.",
 "details": { "title": "is required" },
 "request_id": "req_01HX…"
 }
}

Field	Description
`code`	A stable, machine-readable identifier. Branch on this, not on the message.
`message`	Human-readable and safe to show a user. Internal errors never leak specifics.
`details`	Optional. Present mainly on validation errors as a field → message map.
`request_id`	Included when available, and always in the `X-Request-Id` response header.

Handling errors

Check the HTTP status first, then the code for anything you want to handle specifically:

How do I contact support?

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Whenever you need a hand, Contact Support is built right into Harbor — every app has it, and a real person answers. Prefer email? That works too. Either way, we typically get back to you within 24 hours.

Where to find Contact Support

It lives in the same place on every platform:

Web — open Settings → Contact Support. It’s also in the account menu in the top corner.
Mac — Settings → Contact Support (also under Help).
iPhone and iPad — Settings → Contact Support.
Android — Settings → Contact Support.
Windows — Settings → Contact Support.
Command line — run harbor support (see below).

What the form looks like

The form is short on purpose. Your name and email are already filled in from your account — we reply to that address, so there’s nothing to type there. You pick a category, add a subject and a message, and optionally attach screenshots or files.

Is there a free plan?

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You can use Harbor free — create an account and start without paying anything. Free accounts include a usage allowance, and within it, Harbor simply works.

If you outgrow the allowance, your account becomes read-only until you upgrade. Nothing is deleted, and nothing is held over you: a read-only account can still read every note, export everything, and delete anything. That’s the same never-hostage rule that applies if a paid subscription lapses.

Tags API

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Tags label notes, and they nest — a tag can live under a parent tag, Evernote-style. This page covers the tag CRUD endpoints plus the note–tag relation endpoints that attach, list, replace, and detach tags on a note.

Tag CRUD requires the tags scope. The note–tag relation endpoints — including GET /api/v1/tags/:id/notes — require the notes scope instead, because tagging is note organization. Each endpoint below states its scope.

Can I paste Markdown into a note?

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Yes. Paste Markdown — the plain-text formatting AI assistants and code sites use — and Harbor spots it and asks how you want it pasted.

You’ll see a box titled It looks like you’re pasting Markdown, with three choices:

Convert to a styled note — headings, lists, tables and emphasis become real formatting.
Paste into a code block — keeps it as monospace source.
Paste as is — exactly as you copied it.

Harbor asks instead of guessing because there’s no way to be right every time. A ChatGPT answer usually wants converting; a chunk of shell script full of # comments almost never does.

How does email to notes work?

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Every Harbor account gets its own private email address — something like janedoe.k3f9qzab@m.harbor.my. Forward an email to it and it lands in Harbor as a normal note: the subject becomes the title, the body becomes the note, and any attachments come along — OCR’d and searchable like anything else you add.

Tasks & Reminders API

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Tasks are their own records — a client-generated UUID, a title, and scheduling fields — that sync across devices like notes do (every write allocates a fresh USN; deletes are tombstones). Reminders are simpler: a pair of timestamp fields on a note itself. Everything on this page requires a bearer token with the notes scope.

What happens if I don't use my free account?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Short version: do something with Harbor once every few months and there’s nothing to think about. Open the app, jot a note, tick off a task — any of it keeps a free account happy indefinitely.

Here’s the longer version, because we’d always rather over-explain than surprise you.

This only applies to free accounts that go completely quiet. If you’re paying, none of the below is true — a subscription is never on an inactivity clock, and your notes stay put no matter how long you’re away. And even on the free plan, the smallest bit of activity resets everything.

Can Harbor suggest a title for a note?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yes. Leave the title empty, write (or scan, or record) the note, then press Suggest title.

Harbor reads what’s actually in the note and proposes a title for it. A photographed water bill comes back as something you’d recognize a year later, rather than IMG_4471.

Where the button is

It’s a small ✨ Suggest title pill sitting at the end of the title field, in the note editor.

How do watched folders work?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Pick a folder. Anything that lands in it becomes a note. That’s the whole feature.

It exists for the job nobody enjoys: a stack of paper, a scanner, and an evening spent dragging files into an app one at a time. Point Harbor at the folder your scanner writes to, scan the stack, walk away. The notes are waiting for you — filed in the right notebook, tagged, and searchable by the words inside them.

Search & OCR API

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Harbor search runs against a per-user FTS5 index, ranked by BM25. It covers two endpoints: GET /search runs a query and returns ranked note and attachment hits with snippets, and GET /search/coordinates returns the on-page bounding boxes of matched words inside a single attachment — the endpoint behind the yellow inline OCR highlights you see in Harbor search.

Files & Attachments API

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The files API moves attachment bytes in and out of Harbor and manages the metadata around them. Every endpoint on this page requires a bearer token with the files scope.

How files work

Attachment bytes are content-addressed: every blob is stored under a key derived from its sha256. That makes blobs immutable, de-duplicated within your account (the same file attached to five notes is stored once), and never-conflicting. Blobs are strictly per-user — storage keys are namespaced by the owner, so a hash never reaches another user’s bytes.

Templates, Shortcuts & Saved Searches API

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This page covers three sibling resources: templates (reusable note starting points, plus an apply endpoint that materializes a fresh note), shortcuts (the user’s ordered sidebar pins), and saved searches (named search queries). All three are syncable structural records — every mutation allocates a USN, deletes are tombstones, and sync conflicts resolve last-write-wins.

Sharing API

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sharing publishes a note as a public, read-only page reachable by an unguessable token. A note is either fully private or public read-only — there is no fine-grained ACL and no collaboration: visitors can read, never edit.

The three share-management endpoints require the notes scope. The public read endpoints require no authentication at all.

Two rules worth stating up front:

Trash, History & Activity API

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

These endpoints cover what happens to a note around its edits: deleting and un-deleting it, reading and reverting its past versions, auditing who changed what from which device, and seeing which notes link to which. Everything on this page requires a bearer token with the notes scope.

Two levels of delete

Harbor deletes notes in two distinct steps, tracked by two independent fields on the note object:

Import & Export API

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is Harbor’s Evernote-portability surface: upload a .enex file and Harbor imports every note in it — content, tags, attachments, web clips, even Evernote Tasks — as a job you can poll; or export a notebook (or a hand-picked set of notes) back out as a valid <en-export> document. If you’re moving from Evernote, the switch guide walks through the whole migration — this page documents the API underneath it.

Sync & Keystore API

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is the advanced surface for building a full Harbor client — an app that keeps a complete local copy of a user’s notes and works offline. Clients pull server changes since a cursor, push their local changes, register devices, and acknowledge how far they have caught up. Ordering is server-authoritative.

Most integrations don’t need this page. If you’re automating notes, notebooks, tags, or files, use the plain REST resource endpoints — they’re simpler and give you the same data. Raw sync is for offline-capable clients that maintain their own local store (desktop apps, mobile apps, CLIs with a cache). Start with the Notes API unless you know you need a change feed.

Account API

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The account surface covers who you are (profile), how Harbor behaves for you (settings), what’s plugged in (connections), how much of your plan you’ve used (usage), and the full-account export. Every endpoint here requires the profile scope — which every token gets by default — except the account-export pair, which needs only a valid bearer token, and the email-change confirmation, which is public.

A second brain and a second set of hands

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How and where you use your notes is your call. Here’s what that looks like when your coding agent can both write to your second brain and read from it.

Harbor is here

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The doors are open. Harbor launches on Mac, Windows, the web, and the Web Clipper — private by design, exportable forever, and never held hostage. Here’s everything that’s live today.

Our price promise

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Harbor price promise, written down in public: $9.99 a month or $99 a year, locked for three years, capped after that, never held hostage.

Bring your own AI

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why Harbor ships no built-in AI, and how the open API, the harbor CLI, an agent skill, and MCP let the AI you already trust work your notes.

How OCR search works in Harbor

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Harbor reads the words inside your photos, scans, and recordings, then highlights the exact match on the page. Here’s how it works.

What a second brain actually needs

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Strip away the marketing and a second brain has five real requirements. Most tools in this category traded them away, one at a time.

Move from Evernote in one step

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A practical guide to leaving Evernote: export your notes as ENEX, import them into Harbor, and keep your notebooks, tags, and attachments intact.

Building Harbor in public

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why Harbor is being built in the open: honest progress notes, a public price promise, and a blog that chronicles the road to launch.

Why we're building Harbor

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The letter that started Harbor: what happened to Evernote, what a second brain owes you, and the nine commitments we’re building on.

Bring Your Own AI

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Capture Everything

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Delete Your Account and Data

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

You can delete your account and everything in it whenever you choose. It’s your data; leaving completely is always on the table.

How to delete your account

You can do it yourself, from any Harbor app or the web app — no email required, no waiting on us.

Open Settings, then Account.
Choose Delete my account.
Confirm with your password.

That removes your notes, notebooks, tags, tasks, attachments, and account data.

Download

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Encryption & Privacy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Every Device, Even Offline

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Get help

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Harbor Support

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Harbor is made by Cloudmanic Labs, LLC, a small software company in Oregon, USA. There is no ticket robot and no outsourced call center — support email goes to the people who build Harbor.

Email us

For anything at all — questions, bug reports, billing, feedback, or just to say hello — email help@harbor.my.

We answer every message, usually within one business day (Pacific Time).

Harbor Web Clipper — Privacy Policy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Harbor Web Clipper is a browser extension that saves web pages — as simplified articles, full-page snapshots, bookmarks, or screenshots — into your own Harbor account. This policy describes everything the extension collects, stores, and transmits.

The short version

The extension talks to exactly one service: your Harbor account. It bundles no third-party trackers or analytics SDKs, loads no third-party services, and shows no ads.
Page content is read and transmitted only when you explicitly clip a page, and it is sent only to your Harbor account.
Harbor does measure how the Web Clipper is used, on Harbor’s side, to run and improve the product — see Usage & analytics below.
The extension never sees or stores your password. You sign in on Harbor’s own website; the extension holds only revocable OAuth tokens.

What the extension stores on your device

All local data lives in your browser’s extension storage:

Notes & Notebooks

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Pricing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Privacy Policy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Harbor is a personal notes app made by Cloudmanic Labs, LLC, a small company in Oregon, USA. Your notes are some of the most personal data you have, so this policy is written to be read — plain English, no walls of legalese. If anything is unclear, email us at help@harbor.my and a real person will answer.

Refund Policy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Money stuff should be simple. Here’s the whole policy.

30-day money-back guarantee

Try Harbor. If it’s not for you, we’ll give your money back.

If Harbor isn’t right for you, email help@harbor.my within 30 days of your first purchase — monthly or annual, doesn’t matter — and we’ll refund it in full. No questions asked, no forms, no “retention specialist.” One email does it.

Search & OCR

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Security

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Switching from Evernote

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Terms of Service

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

These are the terms for using Harbor, a personal notes service operated by Cloudmanic Labs, LLC (“Harbor,” “we,” “us”), an Oregon, USA limited liability company. By creating an account or using Harbor, you agree to them. We’ve written them to be read — short sections, plain English — because trust is the whole product. Questions? Email help@harbor.my.

Web Clipper

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why Harbor

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Harbor

Does Harbor have built-in AI?

Does Harbor work offline?

Getting started

Base URL

How do I import from Evernote?

How do I scan a document?

How do notebooks and tags work?

How do passkeys and 2FA work?

Passkeys

How does encryption work in Harbor?

How does OCR search work?

OAuth & Tokens API

The Harbor CLI

Install

Homebrew (macOS & Linux)

What happens if I stop paying?

What is Harbor?

Which browsers does the Web Clipper support?

How do I encrypt or decrypt a single note?

Can an app or AI read my encrypted notes?

Are the Harbor apps really native?

Authentication

Personal access tokens

Can Harbor record and transcribe meetings?

Transcribing is something you ask for

Can I export everything?

How an export works

Can I search inside PDFs and photos?

Does Harbor support templates?

How do I connect ChatGPT or Claude to Harbor?

How do I start free?

Notes API

What can I clip with the Web Clipper?

What comes across in an Evernote import?

What's the trade-off when I encrypt a note?

Will you raise the price?

How do I use a coupon code?

How is my data backed up?

The four copies

Can I annotate and redact web clips?

Can I restore an old version of a note?

Conventions

JSON and field names

Timestamps

Does Harbor handle handwriting?

Write with Apple Pencil

How do I delete my account and data?

How do refunds work?

Notebooks & Stacks API

What are the Harbor CLI and MCP server?

The harbor CLI

What if I forget my encryption passphrase?

What platforms does Harbor run on?

What search operators does Harbor support?

Will Harbor fill up my disk?

Will my notebooks and tags survive the import?

Can I email notes into Harbor?

Can I share a note with someone?

Errors

The error envelope

Handling errors

How do I contact support?

Where to find Contact Support

What the form looks like

Is there a free plan?

Tags API

Can I paste Markdown into a note?

How does email to notes work?

Tasks & Reminders API

What happens if I don't use my free account?

Can Harbor suggest a title for a note?

Where the button is

How do watched folders work?

Search & OCR API

Files & Attachments API

How files work

Templates, Shortcuts & Saved Searches API

Sharing API

Trash, History & Activity API

The `harbor` CLI