Hi! I am Abdullah Atta, the co-founder of Notesnook. I am really, really excited to share this news with the dev.to community. We have officially open sourced all of our client apps (sync server to be open sourced soon) on GitHub. We'd love if the community chimes in & support us on this new journey!

What is Notesnook?

Notesnook started out as a passion project back in 2019 (3 years after Standard Notes) after I got really frustrated by the lack of good, usable & privacy note taking apps in the market. It might not sound like a pain point to you but privacy is a critical issue in today's digital world & my notes contain my most private thoughts. If you don't share this opinion, I don't blame you.

Google has popularized the "100% free" concept in almost all markets. Look at Google Keep, Gmail, Calendar, Maps & the whole GSuite. Most of it is offered free of charge. Why? Are they crazy? It makes no sense until you realize that Google is primarily an Ads company. They thrive on user data.

If it's free, you are paying with your data.

Notesnook is our take on how note taking should be done. It features 100% end-to-end encrypted sync (free & unlimited for all), encrypted attachments (unlimited storage for as low as $0.99/mo) & encrypted publishing of notes (again free for all). It is a fully cross-platform app built using React & React Native with a primary focus on feature parity. In fact, all our clients have 99% feature parity (something no other note taking app can claim).

Why open source? Why now?

The truth is that we are late to the party. Notesnook was our first rodeo & we didn't realize how important open sourcing is for our users to inspire trust & confidence until much, much later. Better late than never though, right?

Our mission is to make Notesnook a quality product in the open source space like Docker, Nginx, PostHog etc. When we started out Notesnook, we asked ourselves 1 question:

Is it possible to create a privacy respecting note taking service without compromising on convenience & usability?

And here is our proof.

What kind of open source?

We are open sourcing Notesnook under (A)GPL-3.0-or-later. We will not tolerate any compromise on our users' freedom, privacy & peace of mind.

We open sourced Notesnook on September 1 and the response has been huge so far. I summarized our overall experienced in this tweet (would love if you give a follow!)

Notesnook - Open Source & E2E

@notesnook

Open sourcing Notesnook was the right decision. In just 1 day we got:

- 300+ stars on the GitHub repo
- 3000+ views on our website (300% increase)
- 50+ new subscribers
- 500+ new followers

Here's how we did it.

22:16 PM - 02 Sep 2022

How can you help?

We are a small company based in Pakistan entirely self-funded without any VC backing us. We don't have thousands of dollars for ad revenue or influential patrons who'll push us to the edge. All we have is platforms like these.

We'd love if you can star our GitHub repo, become a contributor, spread the word of privacy & tell others about your experience with Notesnook. If you have a platform (podcast, blog, etc.), we'd love to get featured. If you'd like to collaborate with us, we are listening.

That's all. I hope Notesnook will make a difference.

— May privacy reign