Cyanote
App for notes, tasks, habits, and clipboard manager
I just shipped Cyanote, a Mac app that bundles notes, to-dos, calendar, habit tracking, and a proper clipboard manager into one place — for a single $10 payment, no subscription.
The reason it exists: I was paying for five different subscription apps to cover the same ground — a notes app, a task manager, a habits tracker, a clipboard tool, and a calendar app — and none of them talked to each other. That added up to about $260/year for tools that all just wanted access to the same data.
Cyanote is local-first. Everything lives in a database on your own Mac — nothing uploaded, no account, no server. That's a deliberate tradeoff: because there's no server, there's no sync between machines either. You can't have the $10-forever price and the sync infrastructure at the same time, so I picked the one that matched how I actually work (one laptop, all day).
What's in it:
Notes with Markdown import/export
Tasks and a calendar view
Habit tracking
A built-in clipboard manager (history, search, pinning)
Export everything to a single JSON file — no lock-in
It's notarized by Apple, runs on macOS 12+ (Apple Silicon and Intel), and updates are free forever after the one-time purchase. A Windows version is on the way, covered by the same $10.
Would love feedback from anyone who's felt the same subscription fatigue — especially on what's missing before it's a full replacement for your current stack.
3 Comments
The $10 one-time price is a strong constraint, but the lack of sync is probably the real tradeoff users will judge. Curious whether people see the local-first model as a feature or simply something they tolerate for the price.
I’m curious about that too. If Cyanote were $5 instead of $10, do you think the value proposition would change meaningfully, or is local-first vs. sync the bigger deciding factor?
That’s the tradeoff I’d be most interested in understanding too. The answer probably depends on how strongly users value local-first versus how much they expect sync as table stakes. If you’re open to continuing the conversation, what’s the best email to reach you at?