Benchpad blog
The note app graveyard
The history of free note apps is a history of rug pulls — Springpad, Wunderlist, Google Reader. Here's why Benchpad costs money, and why that's the point.
Springpad shut down in 2014. 5 million users. No warning.
Wunderlist was acquired by Microsoft in 2015 and killed in 2020.
Google Reader: killed 2013. Google Inbox: killed 2019. Google Keep: still alive, but for how long?
Evernote raised $290 million in venture funding, laid off most of its team, sold to an Italian holding company, raised prices, and is now a cautionary tale about what happens when a free note app runs out of money.
The structural problem with free note apps
Free note apps have to get big or die trying.
If you're free, you're probably VC-funded. VC-funded means you need exponential growth to justify the investment. Exponential growth in a note app means adding features to get press, onboarding users you can't retain, and burning runway on growth experiments instead of making the core product better.
When the funding runs out, you either find a business model (usually: raise prices on existing users who signed up for free) or you sell to someone who acquires your user base and then kills the product.
Neither is good for your notes.
The data problem
When Springpad shut down, it gave users 30 days to export. Some made it. Some didn't.
When a free product disappears, your data goes with it unless you planned ahead. Most people don't, because nothing bad has happened yet.
The risk calculus is obvious in retrospect. A free tool with no revenue has no sustainable existence. The question is never if it will disappear. It's when, and how much warning you'll get.
What the $10 pays for
Benchpad costs $10 a year. That's why it should still be here in 10 years.
A small recurring revenue per user is the business model that aligns the company's interests with yours. You pay for the tool. The tool serves you. There's no other revenue source — no reason to mine your data, no ads, no pivot to "enterprise."
$10/year across enough users covers servers, development, and support. It doesn't fund a rocket ship. It doesn't need to. The goal isn't to be the biggest note app. It's to be the one still here when the others have run through their funding.
The free tier
Benchpad has a free tier. No credit card required to start: one pad, the full editor, offline, and sync.
Pro ($10/year) unlocks the other two pads, all eight themes, attachments, voice notes, and Markdown/PDF export. But the free tier is genuinely usable — not a feature-crippled trial. We're not hiding the price; we're telling you it exists and why.
Your subscription keeps us online so you can stay offline
The irony of offline-first software is that it still needs servers for sync, auth, and backups. The offline experience is funded by the subscription.
When you pay $10/year, you're not buying online features. You're maintaining the infrastructure that makes the offline experience safe — the background sync, the conflict-free merging of your edits, the backups that exist if something goes wrong on your device.
Your notes live on your device. Your subscription keeps the rest alive so they don't have to.
An honest word on what we can promise
We can't promise we'll be here forever. No company can.
We can tell you that we have a business model that doesn't require your data, a structure that doesn't require exponential growth, and a product intentionally small enough that it doesn't need a team of 40 to maintain.
We can tell you that your notes live on your device in plain markdown, and that if we disappeared tomorrow, they'd still be there. They were never exclusively ours.
The note app graveyard is full of apps that needed to be big to survive. We're trying to build something that only needs to be useful.
Benchpad is three scratchpads. Offline-first. Plain markdown. $10/year. Start writing free
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