A New Price For Simplenote: Free

John Gruber’s favorite iPhone notepad app, Simplenote, got an updated earlier this week. From now on, it’s free and supported by advertising.

New customers have a choice. Either get Simplenote with ads for free, or pay five dollars for Simplenote Premium which kills the ads and includes a bunch of other features, namely: automatic version backup, create notes by email, RSS feed for notes, unlimited API usage, and premium support.

Those of you who already own the old version of Simplenote might be wondering: what happens to my existing copy of the app?

The answer is that if you bought the old version at the lower price, you won’t ever see any ads. You can carry on using your existing Simplenote and you won’t notice any difference. But you won’t qualify for those additional Premium features unless you spend another five bucks on the Premium app.

The seductive thing about Simplenote isn’t just the simplicity of the notes (although that is a lovely contrast to Apple’s own Marker Felt-ridden Notes app); no, the seductive thing is the whole Simplenote ecosystem. Once you have a Simplenote account, you have a backup of your notes in the cloud.

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And because it’s an ecosystem with an API, many other applications have been created that give you access to the same notes from your desktop computer as well. Apps like Nottingham, which we wrote about the other day, and DashNote, and half a dozen others.

If you need a simple way of syncing text notes between desktop and iPhone, right now there is no better way of doing it than using Simplenote. And from that point of view, paying a few extra dollars for this version is worth it, even if you have paid before.

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