[antiffan]

I made the switch to Simplenote, and I've had a great experience so far. The main "sacrifice" is that you can only store plain next.

It was created by Automattic, Matt Mullenweg's company.

[mintplant]

Simplenote was actually created by Simperium (YC S10) [1], a company founded by Fred Cheng and Mike Johnston and acquired by Automattic in 2013 [2].

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/simperium

[2] http://simplenote.com/2013/01/24/simplenote-supercharged/

[PhantomGremlin]

I made the switch to Simplenote

I have a problem committing to a program/site that says:

   it’s all completely free

How can they stay in business? Is their business nothing more than data mining my files? Is that something I want to allow? Is that a long term strategy for viability?

[netmare]

Automattic make money from Simperium and they provide Simplenote as a freebie to showcase the technology I guess.

[PhantomGremlin]

That is very helpful. Now their business model makes sense.

I wonder why they don't even mention Simperium on their home page? It's not even mentioned under Help. It's a secret?

They even have a a perfect opportunity to mention it. E.g. in Simplenote Help they say:

   Q: How does syncing work?

   A: All notes are synced between your device
   ...
   they automatically and wirelessly show up
   in the other locations

I guess they want us to hypothesize that magical "Data Fairies" do this syncing?

[coldtea]

>I guess they want us to hypothesize that magical "Data Fairies" do this syncing?

No, they hypothetize that the average user wants a high level description, not to read about servers, incremental sync protocols, etc.

[PhantomGremlin]

They could have added this sentence, more or less:

   The secret sauce underlying this syncing is
   Simperium, a service for developers to move
   data everywhere it's needed, instantly and
   automatically

One extra sentence would have overwhelmed the average user? Bah.

[coldtea]

That doesn't provide any more information to the average user -- which I thought was what was being asked for here. What's "Simperium"? Just a name they don't know to them.

[revorad]

Another vote for Simplenote - does exactly what it says on the tin. In 2-3 years of using it, I had only couple of issues with sync. When I reported them, support was super responsive and the issues were fixed with subsequent updates.

They also offer easy exports of your notes.

If you've never tried, give it a shot - http://simplenote.com

[balladeer]

Simplenote is where I keep my plain text notes now (Notational Velocity on Mac and official app on Android). My local copy of notes reside in my Dropbox folder and my (pretty much) entire ~/ is backed up to CrashPlan cloud.

For notes or docs that need diagram etc I use Google Docs. Even my team uses the same (as part of the Google Apps suite).

What I love about Simplenote is that it does what it says - just plain text notes. No gimmicks, no extra load and bells and whistles.

But I have a feeling that they will shut it down soon. They had a paid tier and they removed it some time back. There has hardly been any update I guess and iirc they don't really update their Android app frequently either.

Do they encrypt the notes at client side before sending it their servers? I would love to use a self hosted app that has such a functional and minimal interface and clean sync feature.