DevonThink - It hurt the most.
Now, It’s true that in most aspects of my life, I am a reasonably frugal man. However, when it comes to technology, I’m willing to spend a little money to solve problems. It’s partly because I believe that giving developers money is a good thing, and partly because I recognise that paying for applications means they are more likely to stick around, long term.
Over the last few years, I have seen more and more software which was once priced in reasonable ways become expensive, changing the deal, like Darth Vader in cloud city.
I have spoken before about how I love GoodLinks, and my one-time purchase has become a £4.99 a year subscription. I had moaned about how the newest version of the Reeder RSS app has turned not a £9.99 a year commitment. And yes, I have even made it known again and again that I was livid about DevonThink which suddenly got far more expensive about a year ago.
The problem is, I have forgiven a lot of these applications, knowing that it is, sadly a part of modern life for things to get pricier.
I tried moving from GoodLink to AnyBox, but it wasn’t the same, so I paid the fiver. I tried other RSS readers, but I just wanted to use Reeder, and, I paid the price.
However, it’s DevonThink which hurts the most, both financially and productively.
DevonThink is about the single best way to keep all my personal knowledge repository all in one place. It lets me make databases for individual topics, which can be synched via iCloud. It allows fast searching, quick note-taking and some rather fancy linking. Once I was really sold on the platform I picked up DevonThingToGo, the iOS/iPadOS companion app.
Now, for clarity, let me explained the cost.
DevonThink 3, on sale cost me £144
DevonThinkToGo, on the App Store cost me £50
I knew that eventually, I would see a version increase and have to extend my licence and excepted to pay a little to do that. I was resided that it would likely cost me £50-£100 to do so, and at the rate of development, at the time, I was looking at around a 3-year turn around.
What I didn’t see coming was for them to change business model and begin asking for $99 a year to continue getting updates.
Now, I realise that updates are not mandatory, and I could skip versions, and I was pleased to see that _(now) _the mobile app is offered as part of the licence.
But, going from £100 every few years, maybe, to a subscription for $99 a year was infuriating. Part of this annoyance was that should, one year, I don’t have the cash or simply not want to spend it, I would lose access to the mobile app. While my desktop software would stop getting updates, the mobile app would be in free mode and have many limits. It’s not an option for me to not get updates on a tool I use every day, and prolifically so. Getting my database nuked because of an os/app incompatibility could lose me some serious data, even with incremental backup in place.
After I gave it some serious thought I went back to Apple Notes and GoodLinks (which started its subscription model around the same time annoyingly, though, for far less money.)
Even now, all these months later, I believe that going all-in on Apple Notes was the right choice. I can’t see a reason for me to switch away from Apple and should it ever actually happen, there are tools to export all the notes in markdown or RTF format. As for GoodLinks, it also has export options too.
While Apple Notes isn’t as feature packed as other options, it covers what I need well. I can attach just about anything I would want to a note, I can write anything from a phone number to a novel in the same window and it just sort of shrugs and accepts it without issue. While a few people on various forums have complained about synching issues, I’ve never had any problems at all and almost always, it turns out the people having issues were doing something very odd when it broke.
And, best of all, I can’t see an even a small chance of it suddenly costing me $99 a year.
I did consider Obsidian for plenty of reasons; however, I am far too prone to tinkering should I have the ability to do so.
Apple Notes works fine and I no longer let myself get distracted by other options. It’s a simple life, but I have to say, of all the things which changed the deal, it’s DevonThink which hurt the most because, honestly, I really liked it and would likely have grown old looking at its window. And, the very fact that I wrote this post is an indication that we dont always get over an ex.