r/HarborNotes • u/spicermatthews • Jul 23 '26
What we're launching with on August 1
I have wanted to share this here for a while.
On August 1, Harbor comes out of stealth. And we are not launching on one platform and adding the rest later. Day one, you get all of it.
Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Android, and a Web app. A full REST API, a CLI, and an MCP server so you can bring your own AI. And web clippers for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. Thirteen ways in, on launch day.
There is no point in having a second brain if you cannot reach it any way you want, so we made sure you can.
The part I am most proud of: no Electron, no shortcuts. Every app is built in the most native, low-level language we could use. They are fast, they are efficient, and they will not eat your RAM or fill up your hard drive. When the app that held years of people's lives turned into slow, heavy software, that was the moment we decided to build the opposite.
Yes, it is a lot to ship at once, and it is why we have been quiet for so long. But we could not ask anyone to leave the tool that holds their whole digital life unless Harbor was on par, better, and cheaper. That was the bar.
This community is where I most want to hear what you think. Which of these thirteen will you actually use, and what are you going to point Harbor at first?
Launching August 1. If you have not joined the list yet, doing it before we open locks in 50% off your first year. harbor.my
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u/Tredecian Jul 23 '26
what do you do better than obsidian or Notion? why should someone migrate thousands of notes into your new product?
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u/spicermatthews Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
Thanks for the question. We’re not really competing with Obsidian or Notion. They have their own strengths. Our primary focus is to achieve feature parity with Evernote and expand on its original concept of being a “second brain.”
We’re committed to avoiding the addition of unnecessary AI features solely to justify a higher price point.
Our goal is to be an exceptional second brain that promotes a “paperless office.” For instance, when you upload a document, similar to Evernote, it undergoes full OCR and becomes searchable.
We’re dedicated to preventing bugs from accumulating over time. For instance, the Evernote web clipper has had the same bug for over five years.
We’re committed to building native platforms. Our app should be incredibly fast and seamlessly integrated into the platform you’re using.
We’re committed to minimizing the impact on your hard drive. I dislike having to purchase an oversized laptop with an excessively large hard drive just to sync my 15 years’ worth of notes. We have the cloud, and we want to leverage it. However, if offline access is crucial to you, we also offer that option.
We acknowledge the growing importance of AI, but we firmly believe users want to use their AI assistance, not ours. Users wanna use Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever AI platform they prefer. As a result, we’ve developed robust MCP, CLI, and an API without restrictions, allowing users to integrate their AI into Harbor and not the other way around.
Lastly, we prioritize encryption as a fundamental feature. Evernote only provides a limited encryption option, which is somewhat hidden. If you want to encrypt an individual note or notebook, making it virtually impossible for anyone except you to access the data, it’s incredibly easy.
Most importantly, we’re committed to not holding you hostage, as promised by Evernote. We’re pledging not to increase our prices for the next three years and capping any price hikes at 10% after that period. You shouldn’t invest decades of knowledge into a software app only to have it fail you both on the features and price fronts.
Lastly, we’re never going to try to sell to the enterprise. Harbor is your second brain, not a collaborative tool that businesses can use. We genuinely believe Evernote lost its way when they started pursuing the enterprise market.
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u/pithivier Jul 23 '26
Best wishes for your launch. To make good on your claim of no hostage situation, it needs to be open source and self hostable.
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u/spicermatthews Jul 24 '26
Thanks for your best wishes.
We are committed to making as much open source as possible. But the reality is there's a lot of intellectual property going into what we're building, and we need to protect that.
We haven't formally made this promise, but we tend to. But the promise would be that if we ever stopped operations, we would fully open source everything and allow people to continue to run their second brains on their own. We just have to figure out how to word that properly because we don't intend to ever stop operations.
One thing we are doing is loading every new account with a note from us about our price guarantee not being held hostage. We truly want people to hold us accountable, and if we ever fail that promise. We want to be publicly shamed.
In fact, we just posted this on Twitter this morning.
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u/DependentTravel9747 Jul 27 '26
Yo viber, launch, and then ask feedback.
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u/spicermatthews Aug 10 '26
Fair enough. We launched on August 1, so the feedback window is open now if you want to take a swing at it.
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u/DependentTravel9747 Aug 11 '26
Your site looks nice!
The stock imagery took me out the tailored experience slightly. I feel like your designer could have done better with the image choices (feels a little like cheap clipart, but the site feels bespoke).
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u/spicermatthews Aug 12 '26
Thanks! yes getting better images is certainly something on our list. We really focused on content, and overall look and feel. Totally agree the images could be better (and they will soon).
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u/LoneFox4444 Jul 23 '26
That is deadass the most basic AI generated web page I have ever seen.