Evernote Burned Its Loyalists. Cimanote Is Betting That Grudge Never Fades.

The Macro: The Note App Graveyard Is Weirdly Full of Opportunity

Evernote was, for a long time, the answer to “what app do you use for notes?” That era is over. Between 2022 and 2023, the company went through ownership changes, layoffs, and a pricing overhaul that pushed their personal plan to $14.99 a month with almost no runway for existing users to adjust. The free tier got gutted to a single device. People who’d used the app for a decade suddenly couldn’t open their notes on both their phone and their laptop without paying.

That’s not a small thing. It’s a trust violation. And those users went somewhere.

The obvious answer was Notion, which ate a huge chunk of the knowledge-worker market and kept growing. But Notion is a different beast. It’s powerful in ways that are also exhausting. It’s a blank canvas that requires you to have opinions about databases before you can take a grocery list. A lot of former Evernote people landed there and felt like they’d traded one problem for a different one.

Obsidian picked up the power-user crowd. Apple Notes quietly became the default for people who just wanted things to work. Joplin and Notesnook exist for the privacy-conscious. The note-taking space is genuinely crowded, and most of the interesting products I’ve covered lately, including tools like TypeBoost that sit adjacent to the productivity workflow, are betting on the idea that users are fatigued by complexity and will pay for speed and simplicity.

The productivity apps market is valued at over $14 billion and growing, according to Fortune Business Insights. There is clearly money here. The question is always who the money flows to, and right now a good chunk of it is sitting in apps that former Evernote users settled for rather than chose.

The Micro: One Year Free, One Clear Target, One Obvious Bet

Cimanote’s pitch is not subtle. The tagline is literally “the fast, clean note app Evernote used to be.” Founder Blagoja (the product website credits the founder by first name) built this as a direct response to Evernote’s decline, and the product page reads like a point-by-point grievance list against the old product. Which, honestly, is a fine way to do positioning when the grievances are real and widely shared.

Feature-wise, it covers the basics well. Rich text editor, notebooks and tags, real-time collaboration, offline mode, cross-device sync with no device limits. The headline feature for anyone still stuck in Evernote is the import tool: it claims to migrate notes, notebooks, tags, and attachments fully intact. If that works reliably, it removes the biggest actual barrier to switching, which isn’t price or interest, it’s the sunk cost of years of organized notes that feel impossible to move.

The pricing structure is interesting. First year completely free for the first 500 users, no credit card required, then $6 a month after that with no stated add-ons. That’s a real swing. It’s less than half of what Evernote charges now, and the no-card-required part removes friction in a way that most SaaS tools are scared to do because it tanks conversion benchmarks.

It got solid traction when it launched on Product Hunt, landing in the daily top ten.

What I can’t tell from the outside is how the editor actually feels in practice. “Blazing fast” is a thing every note app claims. The real test is whether it holds up when you have thousands of notes and attachments, which is exactly the situation Evernote refugees are coming from. If the import works and the speed claim is real, Cimanote has a window. Collaboration features also put it in conversation with tools like talat that are trying to make shared knowledge work feel less clunky.

One thing I’d flag: according to LinkedIn, a founder named Mayank Jain is associated with the product alongside Blagoja. The team structure isn’t fully clear from public sources.

The Verdict

I think the positioning is genuinely smart. Angry former users of a specific product are a better initial audience than “anyone who takes notes,” because they have a clear before-and-after in their head and they’re actively looking for permission to leave. Cimanote is offering that permission with a low-friction free year attached.

The risk is execution. Note apps are one of those categories where the devil is in the thousandth use case: search across 5,000 notes, formatting that doesn’t break on paste, mobile sync that doesn’t eat your edits. You can’t fake your way through any of that. If the import breaks or the editor chokes on legacy content, the goodwill evaporates fast and the reviews get ugly.

At 30 days, I’d want to know how many of those first 500 free users actually migrated from Evernote versus signed up out of curiosity. At 60 days, whether daily active usage is holding. At 90 days, whether anyone is hitting edge cases in the import and whether support is handling it.

The $6 price point is correct. The free-year offer is bold. If the core product is actually as fast as advertised, this is one of the more honest value propositions I’ve seen in the notes space in a while. That’s a low bar, but it’s a real one.