Proton Acquires Standard Notes

Proton announced this morning that it has acquired Standard Notes, an end-to-end encrypted note-taking app for mobile, desktop, and web, extending the privacy-first Proton ecosystem to yet another important part of digital lives.

“We’re happy to announce that Standard Notes will also join us to advance our shared mission,” Proton founder and CEO Andy Yen writes in the announcement post. “Our personal notes often contain some of our most intimate and sensitive data, and protecting them with end-to-end encryption ensures that they always remain accessible only to you. This really makes Standard Notes complementary to the Proton ecosystem of services, and it is one that we have long used ourselves and are excited to introduce to the Proton community.”

Proton says that Standard Notes will remain open source, freely available, and fully supported. It will honor current Standard Notes subscriptions, and it’s looking at ways it can make Standard Notes more easily accessible to the Proton community while retaining what makes this app “special and much loved.”

And here, I will just note that I’d never heard of Standard Notes, which is surprising given how much time I spend researching writing and note-taking solutions. It looks solid: At a high level, Standard Notes appears to look and work much like Notion and other similar apps. But some basic features like rich text support are locked behind a paywall, which will limit its appeal.

As noted above, there are two subscription tiers, Productivity at $90 per year and Professional at $120, that offer additional functionality like Markdown and rich text support, journaling, folders, revision history, and more. (The more expensive subscription adds 100 GB of encrypted cloud storage, subscription sharing, no file size limits, offline file access, and so on.)

Still, this is an interesting expansion of Proton’s family of products and services, which now includes Proton Mail (email), Proton Calendar, Proton Drive (cloud storage), Proton VPN, Proton Pass (password management), and the Proton for Business suite. It’s unclear whether Standard Notes will be rolled into this family (and rebranded) or whether it will remain semi-autonomous, like Proton’s SimpleLogin email alias service.