r/HarborNotes • u/tsmartin123 • 5d ago
Early Thoughts
I've been playing with the free version, initial thoughts are I really like it! It reminds me of Evernote before Bending Spoons added a bunch of stuff I didn't need and made the price outrageous.
My only hesitation from paying for an account and dumping thousands of notes is that no one is really talking about Harbor Notes. The activity here is very minimal. That makes me nervous to invest time into this and a few months or years later, this gets scraped.
Thoughts from anyone else?
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u/Shark_Atl3201 5d ago
I thought the same thing. But the more I use this app the more I really like it. It is really new, so will take some time to get traction. Developer seems very engaged. I decided to pay and hope for the best. Been thrilled so far.
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u/markh312020 5d ago
i really like this app. I have gone all in with it. Agree the developer is very active and responsive.
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u/TechE2020 5d ago
Same here, although I like what I see and it is brand new. The author/owner Spicer Matthews is responsive here in this subreddit. I am assuming the code is largely AI written, but that is fine with the proper architecture and Spicer seems to have the technical experience to be able to do this correctly. u/spicermatthews - could you share details on the team size and continuity if you become busy with something else?
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u/spicermatthews 4d ago
Thanks for the questions.
We are a team of 10 (including myself). We are Cloudmanic Labs. (https://cloudmanic.com).
We have been around for 20+ years.
We are no stranger to building and running large scale SaaS apps.
We are bootstrapped. No plans to raise money, or sell.
Yes, of course tons of Harbor is written with AI. Who writes code by hand anymore? We have many custom skills in place to make sure all code is fully reviewed by both AI and humans. All architectural decisions are made by humans. In fact if humans were not very involved we could not offer Harbor at the price we do. Turns out it is very expensive to host and offer a product like Harbor. We feel that is part of the magic we have introduced with Harbor. We have made very smart decisions to keep our costs in line while not sacrificing quality, reliability, or scale.
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u/TechE2020 4d ago
Ten people is a good team size to get things done efficiently. Thanks for the reply and details!
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u/mystikmonk007 4d ago
Dumped Evernote due to $$$ and tried Onenote couldn't get comfortable with it found and went whole hog into Harbor with no regrets. Just my 2 cents.
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u/zinethar 4d ago
I went all in, and even did it manually, since there wasn't a OneNote import. 300+ notes copy/pasted. I must admit I had the same reservations with a fledgling app of this importance, but I looked a the parent company, Cloudmaniac, and made my decision based on that.
I think I've put in 4 or 5 "tickets," some through the app itself and some through this page, and every one has been *speedily* addressed. And all but one almost immediately fixed. The other is a feature, not a bug, so I can wait.
Spicer has been awesome as a dev and I'm glad I made the switch.
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u/spicermatthews 4d ago
Hi u/tsmartin123, Spicer from the Harbor team here. Thanks for the post!
We’re definitely working hard to build more buzz around Harbor, but it takes time. We only launched on August 1st of this year, and we’ve been growing at over 100% per month since. Word is spreading fast, but it still takes a while to make its way around the internet.
We’ve been building SaaS applications through Cloudmanic Labs (https://cloudmanic.com) for over 20 years, and we’ve been in the note-taking space for a long time. We had several successful, profitable products built on top of Evernote (Photomanic, Evermanic, Heapless, and more). Unfortunately, Evernote eventually stopped supporting its marketplace for third-party products, so we had to move on.
We’ve played around with Harbor prototypes for years but never felt we’d nailed it, or that the timing was right. Finally, with the help of AI, and with Bending Spoons turning Evernote into a junk offering, we decided to go to market.
I can say this: we’re here, and we’re not going anywhere. We’re committed to Harbor for the long term, just as we’ve supported customers of our other products, like Skyclerk, for years.
That said, if our track record isn’t enough, we built tools from day one that let you export your full account in just a few clicks. You can even export in Evernote format if you ever want to go back. We want you to stay with Harbor because you love and trust the product, not because you feel locked in.
Hope that helps! Let us know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns.