847 points by hi_im_vijay4 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 60 comments
simonw2127 points3 hours ago
oh great, another note-taking app. because what the world really needed was the 847th notes app with 'ai-powered semantic search'. let me guess - it'll be shut down in 18 months when the vc money runs out?
fair criticism. to be clear - we're bootstrapped and self-funded. no vc money means no pressure to chase growth at all costs. just trying to build something useful.
simonw245 points2 hours ago
ok that's actually refreshing. i've been burned by notion's pricing changes and roam's instability. will give it a look.
throwaway_78123 points1 hour ago
"profitable" - how many users? if it's just you paying yourself $1/month that technically counts.
~350 users, 11 paying. launched two weeks ago. revenue covers infrastructure costs so far. we're not trying to be a unicorn - just building something useful and sustainable.
jmsmith34 points2 hours ago
honestly at this point i have notes in apple notes, obsidian, notion, and three different markdown folders. what's one more?
localfirstfan287 points3 hours ago
no offline mode in 2026? the faq literally says 'jottie requires an internet connection'. my obsidian vault has survived 4 laptops, 2 operating systems, and zero cloud dependencies. why would i trade that for someone else's server?
mrkwong156 points2 hours ago
not everyone wants to spend a weekend setting up obsidian-smart-connections, configuring ollama, managing plugin updates, and debugging why the graph view is suddenly slow. some people want to open a browser and write.
localfirstfan89 points2 hours ago
it took me maybe 2 hours total to set up my vault. i've been using it for 3 years. that's 0.06 hours per month amortized. meanwhile you're paying $4/month forever.
mrkwong112 points1 hour ago
you're also maintaining it forever. every obsidian update breaks something, plugins get abandoned, syncthing conflicts happen at the worst times. there's a reason 'it just works' is a selling point.
pkb92178 points1 hour ago
fellow obsidian user here. let's be real - my vault is a mess of broken dataview queries, orphaned daily notes, and plugins i forgot i installed. the 'second brain' became a junk drawer. maybe simpler is better.
txtfileguy78 points2 hours ago
this. my notes have survived 15 years across 4 operating systems because they're just .md files in a folder. what's the export story when jottie pivots to enterprise or gets acqui-hired?
bkelly8934 points1 hour ago
i asked support and they emailed me a json export within an hour. not markdown but it's structured and portable. more than i can say for my evernote export which was a disaster of nested html.
rnduser847312 points2 hours ago
15 notes on the free tier? that's not a trial, that's a demo. i have 15 notes from last tuesday alone. at least notion gives you unlimited pages before pushing you to paid.
fair point on the limit. the economics are different though - we run embeddings and ai processing on every note, which costs real money per user. notion's pages are basically free to store until you hit their ai features (which cost $10/month extra). we include semantic search and chat in the base price.
rnduser84767 points1 hour ago
appreciate the honesty about costs. still feels like 15 is too low to get a real sense of whether the ai features are actually useful for my workflow.
taking this feedback seriously. we've discussed raising it to 25 or 50 but need to run the numbers. the 5 chat messages/month limit is probably more restrictive tbh.
payforsoft89 points1 hour ago
$4/month is literally one fancy coffee. if you're evaluating a productivity tool by whether the free tier is generous enough, you're probably not the target customer. some of us are happy to pay for software.
privacynut89 points2 hours ago
"aes-256-gcm encryption with per-user keys managed by google cloud kms" - so google has access to my encryption keys. that's not encryption, that's security theater. i could accept this for a shopping list app, not for private thoughts.
tptacek_fan145 points2 hours ago
that's not how kms works. the keys are in hardware security modules, google employees can't extract them without triggering alerts. is it e2ee? no. but server-side semantic search fundamentally requires the server to read your data. you can't have both.
privacynut23 points1 hour ago
any architecture that requires trusting a third party with my private thoughts is a non-starter. but i accept i'm not the target audience here.
ex_gcp_pm67 points1 hour ago
worked on kms at google. there are so many access controls and audit logs that unauthorized access would trigger immediate incident response. not saying it's mathematically impossible, but practically speaking your notes are safer there than on your laptop with filevault.
threatm0del56 points1 hour ago
who is your threat model exactly? nation state actors? google employees? random hackers? for most people, 'encrypted at rest with managed keys' is plenty. if you're edward snowden, use pen and paper.
en_refugee234 points2 hours ago
been using this for 6 months after my obsidian vault became a graveyard of half-organized folders and my evernote became unusably slow. the semantic search actually works - searched 'that feedback from the beta user about onboarding' and it found the right note from 4 months ago. i never would have found that with keyword search.
curiouscat945 points2 hours ago
how does it compare to notion ai? they have semantic search too now.
en_refugee78 points1 hour ago
notion is trying to be everything - databases, wikis, project management, docs. jottie is just notes. if you want a second brain with linked databases, use notion. if you want to dump thoughts and find them later without organizing, jottie. it's like comparing excel to a calculator - sometimes simpler is better.
def_not_shill12 points1 hour ago
nice try, jottie marketing team
en_refugee56 points1 hour ago
lol check my post history - 8 years of arguing about text editors and complaining about electron apps. if i were a shill i'd be very committed to the bit.
notionfan34 points1 hour ago
the comparison page says jottie is '3x cheaper than notion'. notion's ai is $10/month extra, jottie pro is $4/month with ai included. math checks out for once.
vnsk67 points2 hours ago
30 minutes of voice notes per month on pro? i record that much in a single meeting. this feels like a feature checkbox rather than something actually usable.
quickthink9989 points1 hour ago
i use voice notes for quick 30-second thoughts while walking, not meeting transcription. 30 minutes is about 60 quick captures per month which is plenty for that use case. different workflows i guess.
transcription costs are unfortunately high - about $0.006/minute with current apis. 30 minutes costs us ~$0.18/user/month which adds up. we may increase this as prices drop. for meeting transcription, otter.ai or granola are better fits.
uxd_sf156 points1 hour ago
the 'papercraft' aesthetic is surprisingly nice. ruled lines, cream paper, stacked shadows - it feels warm without being cutesy. also all lowercase everywhere is a bold choice. 'ios' instead of 'iOS', 'google' instead of 'Google'. i respect the commitment to the bit.
typog_nerd23 points1 hour ago
the lowercase thing drives me insane. brand names and acronyms exist for a reason. 'aes-256-gcm' instead of 'AES-256-GCM'? that's not aesthetic, that's just incorrect.
uxd_sf45 points45 minutes ago
it's internally consistent at least. better than apps that randomly CAPITALIZE some WORDS for EMPHASIS. looking at you, every fintech landing page.
darkm0de78 points1 hour ago
does it have dark mode? cream paper sounds like eye strain waiting to happen.
yes, dark mode follows system preferences. the cream inverts to a warm dark brown. tried to keep the 'paper' feeling even in dark mode.
justgrep234 points45 minutes ago
find . -name '*.md' | xargs grep -l 'keyword'
there, i just saved you $48/year.
normieuser289 points30 minutes ago
this is the most hn comment i've ever seen. the whole point of semantic search is that you don't need the exact keyword. grep doesn't know that 'sarah's feedback about the signup flow' and 'ux review - s. martinez - onboarding' are about the same thing.
justgrep12 points15 minutes ago
use ripgrep with fuzzy matching. or fzf. or ag. tools exist.
normieuser178 points10 minutes ago
fuzzy matching is still text matching. semantic search uses embeddings to understand meaning. it's like saying 'why use google when you can grep the internet'. fundamentally different problem.
exsysadmin67 points20 minutes ago
i used to think like this. then i calculated i was spending 3 hours a week on 'efficient' terminal workflows that a $4 app could replace. my time is worth more than $1/hour.
mathguy42145 points1 hour ago
5 chat messages per month on free, 1000 on pro. so the chat feature is basically a paid demo on free tier. at least be honest and call it 'chat (pro only)' instead of pretending 5 messages is usable.
pmlife78 points45 minutes ago
5 messages is enough to understand whether the feature is useful for your workflow. it's not meant to be a complete experience. same as how spotify free has ads - you get the idea, you pay for the full experience.
mathguy4234 points30 minutes ago
spotify free is unlimited with ads. this is like if spotify let you play 5 songs per month. the analogy would work if it was 'chat with occasional delays' or 'chat with ads' on free.
fair criticism. honestly the chat limits are probably too conservative - gemini is pretty cheap. we set them early when we weren't sure about costs and haven't revisited. might raise them soon.
ex_en_pm198 points30 minutes ago
i've been hurt too many times. evernote, google keep, notion, craft, bear, roam, logseq. each one either died, raised prices, enshittified, or became a ghost town. at this point i'm emotionally numb to new notes apps. wake me up when one lasts 10 years.
completely understand the fatigue. all i can say is we're building for sustainability, not growth. no investors to please, no exit strategy, no pivot to enterprise planned. just trying to make a living building something useful. ask me again in 10 years.
ex_en_pm89 points15 minutes ago
that's what they all say until the first acquisition offer comes in. no shade, i hope you mean it. the space needs someone to just keep the lights on for a decade.
entarch23 points15 minutes ago
no sso, no scim, no audit logs, no admin console, no soc2. this is a consumer toy, not a real product. call me when you have enterprise features.
smolco167 points10 minutes ago
not everything needs to be enterprise software. some of us just want to write notes without procurement approval and a 6-month security review. the 'enterprise features' checklist is why notion costs $10/user/month.
entarch8 points5 minutes ago
until legal asks about your data retention policy and you realize you've been putting client info in a consumer app.
smolco89 points2 minutes ago
bold of you to assume i work somewhere with a legal team. some of us are at 5-person startups.
ai_skeptic26134 points1 hour ago
'ai-powered' is just marketing speak for 'we call gemini api'. what happens when google raises prices 10x? what happens when they deprecate the model you depend on? your $4/month becomes $40/month overnight or your app breaks.
mleng_sf112 points45 minutes ago
embedding models are commoditized. vertex, openai, cohere, voyage, even open source models. if google raises prices you swap providers. embeddings are embeddings - cosine similarity works the same everywhere.
ai_skeptic2623 points30 minutes ago
until the next model has 'slightly different' dimensions and all your existing embeddings need to be regenerated. that's the lock-in nobody talks about.
mleng_sf78 points15 minutes ago
regenerating embeddings for a few thousand users is maybe a $100 one-time cost. it's not the gotcha you think it is. source: i've migrated embedding systems at work.
triedboth145 points45 minutes ago
i have 2000 notes in obsidian and about 200 in jottie. honest comparison: obsidian is better for long-form writing and linked thinking. jottie is better for quick capture and retrieval. i use both - obsidian for projects, jottie for random thoughts i want to find later. they solve different problems.
onetool34 points30 minutes ago
using two note apps seems like a recipe for never finding anything. how do you decide where something goes?
triedboth67 points20 minutes ago
if it's a fleeting thought or quick capture, jottie. if it's something i want to develop and link to other notes, obsidian. the decision takes 2 seconds. jottie's search is good enough that i don't need to organize, which is the whole point.
oh great, another note-taking app. because what the world really needed was the 847th notes app with 'ai-powered semantic search'. let me guess - it'll be shut down in 18 months when the vc money runs out?
fair criticism. to be clear - we're bootstrapped and self-funded. no vc money means no pressure to chase growth at all costs. just trying to build something useful.
ok that's actually refreshing. i've been burned by notion's pricing changes and roam's instability. will give it a look.
"profitable" - how many users? if it's just you paying yourself $1/month that technically counts.
~350 users, 11 paying. launched two weeks ago. revenue covers infrastructure costs so far. we're not trying to be a unicorn - just building something useful and sustainable.
honestly at this point i have notes in apple notes, obsidian, notion, and three different markdown folders. what's one more?
no offline mode in 2026? the faq literally says 'jottie requires an internet connection'. my obsidian vault has survived 4 laptops, 2 operating systems, and zero cloud dependencies. why would i trade that for someone else's server?
not everyone wants to spend a weekend setting up obsidian-smart-connections, configuring ollama, managing plugin updates, and debugging why the graph view is suddenly slow. some people want to open a browser and write.
it took me maybe 2 hours total to set up my vault. i've been using it for 3 years. that's 0.06 hours per month amortized. meanwhile you're paying $4/month forever.
you're also maintaining it forever. every obsidian update breaks something, plugins get abandoned, syncthing conflicts happen at the worst times. there's a reason 'it just works' is a selling point.
fellow obsidian user here. let's be real - my vault is a mess of broken dataview queries, orphaned daily notes, and plugins i forgot i installed. the 'second brain' became a junk drawer. maybe simpler is better.
this. my notes have survived 15 years across 4 operating systems because they're just .md files in a folder. what's the export story when jottie pivots to enterprise or gets acqui-hired?
i asked support and they emailed me a json export within an hour. not markdown but it's structured and portable. more than i can say for my evernote export which was a disaster of nested html.
15 notes on the free tier? that's not a trial, that's a demo. i have 15 notes from last tuesday alone. at least notion gives you unlimited pages before pushing you to paid.
fair point on the limit. the economics are different though - we run embeddings and ai processing on every note, which costs real money per user. notion's pages are basically free to store until you hit their ai features (which cost $10/month extra). we include semantic search and chat in the base price.
appreciate the honesty about costs. still feels like 15 is too low to get a real sense of whether the ai features are actually useful for my workflow.
taking this feedback seriously. we've discussed raising it to 25 or 50 but need to run the numbers. the 5 chat messages/month limit is probably more restrictive tbh.
$4/month is literally one fancy coffee. if you're evaluating a productivity tool by whether the free tier is generous enough, you're probably not the target customer. some of us are happy to pay for software.
"aes-256-gcm encryption with per-user keys managed by google cloud kms" - so google has access to my encryption keys. that's not encryption, that's security theater. i could accept this for a shopping list app, not for private thoughts.
that's not how kms works. the keys are in hardware security modules, google employees can't extract them without triggering alerts. is it e2ee? no. but server-side semantic search fundamentally requires the server to read your data. you can't have both.
any architecture that requires trusting a third party with my private thoughts is a non-starter. but i accept i'm not the target audience here.
worked on kms at google. there are so many access controls and audit logs that unauthorized access would trigger immediate incident response. not saying it's mathematically impossible, but practically speaking your notes are safer there than on your laptop with filevault.
who is your threat model exactly? nation state actors? google employees? random hackers? for most people, 'encrypted at rest with managed keys' is plenty. if you're edward snowden, use pen and paper.
been using this for 6 months after my obsidian vault became a graveyard of half-organized folders and my evernote became unusably slow. the semantic search actually works - searched 'that feedback from the beta user about onboarding' and it found the right note from 4 months ago. i never would have found that with keyword search.
how does it compare to notion ai? they have semantic search too now.
notion is trying to be everything - databases, wikis, project management, docs. jottie is just notes. if you want a second brain with linked databases, use notion. if you want to dump thoughts and find them later without organizing, jottie. it's like comparing excel to a calculator - sometimes simpler is better.
nice try, jottie marketing team
lol check my post history - 8 years of arguing about text editors and complaining about electron apps. if i were a shill i'd be very committed to the bit.
the comparison page says jottie is '3x cheaper than notion'. notion's ai is $10/month extra, jottie pro is $4/month with ai included. math checks out for once.
30 minutes of voice notes per month on pro? i record that much in a single meeting. this feels like a feature checkbox rather than something actually usable.
i use voice notes for quick 30-second thoughts while walking, not meeting transcription. 30 minutes is about 60 quick captures per month which is plenty for that use case. different workflows i guess.
transcription costs are unfortunately high - about $0.006/minute with current apis. 30 minutes costs us ~$0.18/user/month which adds up. we may increase this as prices drop. for meeting transcription, otter.ai or granola are better fits.
the 'papercraft' aesthetic is surprisingly nice. ruled lines, cream paper, stacked shadows - it feels warm without being cutesy. also all lowercase everywhere is a bold choice. 'ios' instead of 'iOS', 'google' instead of 'Google'. i respect the commitment to the bit.
the lowercase thing drives me insane. brand names and acronyms exist for a reason. 'aes-256-gcm' instead of 'AES-256-GCM'? that's not aesthetic, that's just incorrect.
it's internally consistent at least. better than apps that randomly CAPITALIZE some WORDS for EMPHASIS. looking at you, every fintech landing page.
does it have dark mode? cream paper sounds like eye strain waiting to happen.
yes, dark mode follows system preferences. the cream inverts to a warm dark brown. tried to keep the 'paper' feeling even in dark mode.
this is the most hn comment i've ever seen. the whole point of semantic search is that you don't need the exact keyword. grep doesn't know that 'sarah's feedback about the signup flow' and 'ux review - s. martinez - onboarding' are about the same thing.
use ripgrep with fuzzy matching. or fzf. or ag. tools exist.
fuzzy matching is still text matching. semantic search uses embeddings to understand meaning. it's like saying 'why use google when you can grep the internet'. fundamentally different problem.
i used to think like this. then i calculated i was spending 3 hours a week on 'efficient' terminal workflows that a $4 app could replace. my time is worth more than $1/hour.
5 chat messages per month on free, 1000 on pro. so the chat feature is basically a paid demo on free tier. at least be honest and call it 'chat (pro only)' instead of pretending 5 messages is usable.
5 messages is enough to understand whether the feature is useful for your workflow. it's not meant to be a complete experience. same as how spotify free has ads - you get the idea, you pay for the full experience.
spotify free is unlimited with ads. this is like if spotify let you play 5 songs per month. the analogy would work if it was 'chat with occasional delays' or 'chat with ads' on free.
fair criticism. honestly the chat limits are probably too conservative - gemini is pretty cheap. we set them early when we weren't sure about costs and haven't revisited. might raise them soon.
i've been hurt too many times. evernote, google keep, notion, craft, bear, roam, logseq. each one either died, raised prices, enshittified, or became a ghost town. at this point i'm emotionally numb to new notes apps. wake me up when one lasts 10 years.
completely understand the fatigue. all i can say is we're building for sustainability, not growth. no investors to please, no exit strategy, no pivot to enterprise planned. just trying to make a living building something useful. ask me again in 10 years.
that's what they all say until the first acquisition offer comes in. no shade, i hope you mean it. the space needs someone to just keep the lights on for a decade.
no sso, no scim, no audit logs, no admin console, no soc2. this is a consumer toy, not a real product. call me when you have enterprise features.
not everything needs to be enterprise software. some of us just want to write notes without procurement approval and a 6-month security review. the 'enterprise features' checklist is why notion costs $10/user/month.
until legal asks about your data retention policy and you realize you've been putting client info in a consumer app.
bold of you to assume i work somewhere with a legal team. some of us are at 5-person startups.
'ai-powered' is just marketing speak for 'we call gemini api'. what happens when google raises prices 10x? what happens when they deprecate the model you depend on? your $4/month becomes $40/month overnight or your app breaks.
embedding models are commoditized. vertex, openai, cohere, voyage, even open source models. if google raises prices you swap providers. embeddings are embeddings - cosine similarity works the same everywhere.
until the next model has 'slightly different' dimensions and all your existing embeddings need to be regenerated. that's the lock-in nobody talks about.
regenerating embeddings for a few thousand users is maybe a $100 one-time cost. it's not the gotcha you think it is. source: i've migrated embedding systems at work.
i have 2000 notes in obsidian and about 200 in jottie. honest comparison: obsidian is better for long-form writing and linked thinking. jottie is better for quick capture and retrieval. i use both - obsidian for projects, jottie for random thoughts i want to find later. they solve different problems.
using two note apps seems like a recipe for never finding anything. how do you decide where something goes?
if it's a fleeting thought or quick capture, jottie. if it's something i want to develop and link to other notes, obsidian. the decision takes 2 seconds. jottie's search is good enough that i don't need to organize, which is the whole point.