Is Standard Notes free? Pricing, Markdown and plans for 2026

• Standard Notes has three plans: Standard (free), Productivity ($90/year) and Professional ($120/year).
• The free plan is plain text. Markdown, rich text, checklists, folders and the Web Clipper are paid.
• There is no trial of paid features. Refunds are 14 days on Productivity and 90 days on Professional.
• If a paid plan expires, paid editors become read-only and uploaded files can no longer be viewed or downloaded.
• Standard Notes is genuinely strong on encryption, mobile apps and longevity. A free Markdown notes app is a different job.

Yes. The Standard plan is listed at $0/year. You get end-to-end encryption, unlimited device sync on web, desktop and mobile, offline access, tags, the option to password-protect individual notes, two-factor authentication and a full data export in encrypted or plaintext form.

What you do not get on that plan is a richer editor. The plans page describes free notes as "Plain text notes." If you want to write and edit Markdown or rich text, or make checklists and code snippets in the Super note type, you are looking at a paid plan.

"Is Standard Notes free?" is therefore a yes, with a caveat that surprises people who expect Markdown in a notes app's free tier.

These figures are from standardnotes.com/plans, checked November 9, 2026. The page lists yearly prices only. No monthly price appears there.

Students get a 30% discount, according to the same page. Payments listed there are major debit and credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal. Standard Notes says it does not have a trial system for paid features, and offers a full refund instead, within those 14- or 90-day windows.

The plans comparison table also describes free revision history as "Current session only," Productivity as 1 year and Professional as unlimited.

Standard Notes treats editors as plan features. The free app is a plain text editor. Super notes, which the plans page describes as the way to "write and edit markdown and rich text, checklists, code snippets, and more," are part of Productivity.

That split shows up in support docs too. A help article on adding images says the Super editor is one of the paid features, and that a subscription is required to use it.

This is the complaint people bring when they look for a Standard Notes alternative. In an October 2025 thread on r/StandardNotes, the original poster wrote: "I'm not paying $90 a year just to be able to make lists and checklists when every other app has this feature for free."

The price is not hidden. It is a product choice: a generously featured free encrypted vault for plain text, and a paid tier for the editors many people treat as basic. Whether that is reasonable depends on what you wanted Standard Notes for. If you wanted a steel vault for diary entries and secrets, the free plan already does that job. If you wanted a daily Markdown notebook, $90 a year is the listed price of admission.

This is easy to miss when you are only comparing plan grids.

Standard Notes' expiry help says you immediately lose access to paid features when a subscription expires. Paid note editors enter read-only mode: you can still see the formatting, but you cannot keep editing with those editors. To continue editing, you have to switch the note back to the plain text editor. Files attached to notes or uploaded for storage cannot be viewed or downloaded after expiry. Standard Notes tells you to download a copy of those files first.

Your notes are not deleted on expiry, based on that article. The paid editing surface goes away, and files become inaccessible in the app until you renew or you have a local copy. If you are evaluating Productivity or Professional, export a decrypted backup and download files while the subscription is active.

It is fair to say the Markdown paywall is steep if all you wanted was bold text and lists. It is not fair to treat Standard Notes as just an expensive editor.

Encryption is the product's core. Official help says notes, tags and other data are encrypted with XChaCha20-Poly1305, with keys derived from your password using Argon2, and that encryption happens on your device before sync. The privacy page says data is encrypted anytime it touches a disk, on their servers or on your device, and that Standard Notes cannot read it. The company lists four third-party security audits, the most recent a 2022 Cure53 assessment of the server, plus earlier work by Trail of Bits (2020), Cure53 (2019) and Shackle Labs (2017).

It also runs where Koru does not. The features page lists iOS, Android, web browsers, macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), Windows and Linux. Unlimited device sync is included on the free plan. The app repository is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, and Standard Notes' help says the application and server source are open.

In April 2024, Proton announced that Standard Notes was joining it, and said the product would remain open source, freely available and fully supported, with prices unchanged at that time. Standard Notes still publishes its own plans today. This post is not a claim about Proton bundling or about future prices.

If you need a phone app, a web app, on-disk encryption of notes, or a zero-knowledge cloud copy, Standard Notes remains a serious option, including on the free plan, as long as you are content to write in plain text or to pay for editors.

Koru is my app: a free, open-source notes app for Windows, macOS and Linux. Your notes live in a local database on your device, you do not create an account, and headings, lists, checklists, tables, code, Mermaid diagrams and callouts are included. You can export to Markdown or TextBundle at any time.

Sync between your own computers is free, peer to peer and end-to-end encrypted, built on iroh, with offline edits combined using Loro CRDTs. Both devices need to be online at the same time. Optional Koru Cloud is $9.99 a month for 100 GB of always-on sync and backup. That cloud copy sits on Koru's servers and is not covered by the device-to-device encryption guarantee, and Koru Cloud sign-in is not available on Linux yet.

Koru is not a drop-in Standard Notes replacement. There is no phone app yet, no web app, no web clipper, and no Standard Notes importer. Koru does not encrypt its local database itself; you should use your operating system's disk encryption, as Koru's private notes page explains. Password-protected notes are not available yet. If those Standard Notes strengths are why you picked it, stay.

If you write on a desktop, want Markdown-style notes without a $90 editor plan, and can live without a phone app for now, you can download Koru and keep your Standard Notes export as the backup. The full side-by-side is on Koru as a Standard Notes alternative. For another open-source option that already has phone apps, see Koru's Joplin comparison, and check Joplin's own site for its current editors and prices.

Whatever app you use next, take a Standard Notes backup first.

In the desktop or web app, Standard Notes' backup help says to open Preferences, then Backups, then Data Backups, and to download either an encrypted backup (one file, which needs your account password to restore) or a decrypted zip. The decrypted zip contains a Standard Notes backup file plus a folder of individual plain text files, one per note. The mobile app can export in the same formats.

Keep that zip. If you have files on a Professional plan, download them while you can.

Koru cannot import a Standard Notes backup file today. In principle, exported plain text files might be bringable through Koru's Markdown import after you rename or convert them, but that path has not been tested here. Do not delete your Standard Notes account until you have opened a representative set of notes in the new app.