The Problem with Cloud-Based Note Apps in 2026

Everyone moved to the cloud. Then what?

At some point in the last decade, the default for note-taking became "cloud." Notion, Evernote, Google Keep, Roam Research, Bear. Every new app launched with the same pitch: your notes, everywhere, on every device, synced in real time.

And it worked. For a while.

But in 2026, if you've been using cloud note apps for any amount of time, you've probably run into at least one of these problems. Maybe all of them.

The outage problem

Your notes live on a server. That server goes down, and suddenly your notes don't exist. Not temporarily unavailable. For you, in that moment, they simply don't exist.

Notion's status page history tells the story. Partial outages, degraded performance, API failures. It happens regularly. When it does, people can't access meeting notes minutes before their meetings. Developers can't reach their documentation. Students can't open their study materials during exam prep.

And it's not just Notion. Evernote has had repeated outages and reliability issues for years, especially after the Bending Spoons acquisition. Google Keep depends on Google's infrastructure, which is solid, but still had multiple incidents in 2024. Every cloud service goes down eventually. The question is whether your notes should go down with it.

A plain text file on your hard drive has never had an outage. It's a simple fact, but it matters more than people think.

The price keeps changing

Remember when Evernote was the gold standard for note-taking? A free tier that actually worked, a reasonable premium plan, and millions of loyal users.

Then Bending Spoons acquired Evernote, laid off most of the staff, and the free tier went from 100,000 notes to 50. Not 50,000. Fifty. They raised premium prices and gutted the team. Users who had built years of workflows around Evernote were suddenly stuck: pay significantly more, or figure out how to export everything and start over.

Notion raised its prices in 2025. Craft went from a generous free plan to a model where the good features require a subscription. Roam Research launched at $15/month and never looked back.

The pattern is always the same. Launch with a generous free tier to get users hooked. Build a massive user base. Then slowly tighten the screws. It's not even cynical, it's just the economics of running cloud infrastructure. Servers cost money, and eventually someone has to pay for them.

The problem is that by the time the price goes up, your notes are already locked inside their system. Migration is painful, sometimes incomplete, and always time-consuming.

Your thoughts on someone else's computer

Here's something worth thinking about. When you type a quick note in Notion or Google Keep, that text travels over the internet to a data center, gets stored on a server you don't control, and sits there alongside notes from millions of other people.

For shopping lists, that's probably fine. But people put everything in their note apps. Journal entries. Medical notes. Business ideas they haven't told anyone about. Passwords they know they shouldn't store there but do anyway. Half-formed thoughts that feel too personal to share.

Most cloud note apps encrypt data in transit (HTTPS) and at rest (server-side encryption). But the company still holds the keys. They can read your notes if they want to, or if a government asks them to, or if a breach exposes them. Evernote's privacy policy once explicitly allowed employees to read user notes, and while they walked it back after the backlash, the technical capability remains.

Google scans data across its services for ads and AI training. Notion's privacy policy is better, but they still process your content on their servers.

End-to-end encryption would solve this, but almost no mainstream note app offers it. Standard Notes does. Notesnook does. But Notion, Evernote, Google Keep, Bear, Craft? No.

You know what else solves it? A file on your computer that never leaves your computer.

The sync tax

Cloud sync sounds great in theory. In practice, it introduces a whole category of problems that local files simply don't have.

Sync conflicts. Edit the same note on two devices before they sync, and you get a conflict. Most apps handle this by creating a duplicate "conflicted copy" that you then have to manually merge. Evernote was infamous for this. Notion handles it better, but conflicts still happen.

Slow sync. Open a cloud note app on a plane, in a cafe with bad WiFi, or just in a building with thick walls, and watch the spinner. Your notes are right there on a server somewhere, but you can't reach them.

Sync as a feature gate. Several apps now put sync behind their paid tier. Obsidian charges $4/month for Obsidian Sync. Bear charges for Bear Pro. The basic ability to access your own notes on more than one device costs extra.

Complexity. Cloud sync requires accounts, authentication, conflict resolution, retry logic, offline queues, and migration systems. Every one of these is a potential point of failure. Every one of these makes the app heavier, slower, and more fragile.

Local files don't need any of this. Want to sync plain markdown files between Macs? Point the folder to iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or Syncthing. Want version history? Use git. The tools already exist and they work with any file, from any app, forever.

Vendor lock-in is the quiet trap

This one doesn't hurt until you try to leave. And by then it's too late.

Notion stores your content in a proprietary database. You can export to Markdown, but the export is lossy. Databases, toggles, embeds, synced blocks, all of it either breaks or disappears. Anyone who has tried to export a large Notion workspace knows the pain: hundreds of folders with weird names, broken internal links, and missing content.

Evernote uses ENEX format, which is XML-based but still proprietary. Getting your notes out requires their export tool, and the result is a mess of XML files that no other app can natively open.

Google Keep lets you export via Google Takeout, but the output is JSON and HTML. Not exactly something you can open in another note app.

Roam Research exports to Markdown, but the bi-directional link structure doesn't survive the export. Your interconnected knowledge graph becomes a pile of flat files with broken [[links]].

The common thread: getting your notes into these apps is effortless. Getting them out is a project.

Plain Markdown files don't have this problem. They're just text. Open them in VS Code, Obsidian, iA Writer, Typora, or literally any text editor on any operating system. Your notes are not trapped inside anyone's ecosystem because they were never inside one to begin with.

But I need my notes on multiple devices

Fair. This is the one thing cloud apps genuinely solve well.

But "I need sync" and "my notes must live on someone else's server" are not the same thing. You can have sync without giving up control.

iCloud Drive syncs folders across Apple devices. Dropbox and Google Drive do the same across any platform. Syncthing does it peer-to-peer with no server at all. All of them work with plain files.

The difference is important. With file-level sync, you choose the sync provider. You can switch providers without changing anything about your notes. Your notes are still just files in a folder. The sync layer is separate from the note-taking layer, and you control both.

With a cloud note app, the sync is built into the app. You can't separate them. If you want to leave the app, you lose the sync. And as we covered, leaving is never as easy as it should be.

What we actually lost

Before cloud note apps took over, notes were just files. Text files, Word documents, whatever. They lived on your computer. You could move them, copy them, back them up, open them with any tool. Nobody could revoke your access or change the pricing.

We traded all of that for convenience. And the convenience is real. But the trade-offs are also real, and most people never thought about them until it was too late.

In 2026, the tools exist to have both. You can have instant capture, powerful search, even AI features, all running locally on your machine, with your notes saved as plain files you fully own.

That's the approach we took with Stik. Every note is a .md file in a folder on your Mac. Search runs locally using on-device AI. No account, no cloud dependency, no subscription. If you want sync, point the folder to iCloud Drive and you're done.

We're not saying cloud apps are evil. Notion is a fantastic collaboration tool. Google Docs is unbeatable for real-time teamwork. But for your personal notes, your quick thoughts, your private ideas? Those don't need to live on a server.

They never did.

Further reading

If this topic interests you, the local-first software essay by Ink & Switch is the best deep dive into why local-first architecture matters. It's long but worth every minute.

The GDPR has also pushed the conversation forward in Europe, making people more aware of where their data actually lives.

And if you want to try a different approach to note-taking on Mac, Stik is free and open source. Give it a shot and see how it feels to own your notes again.