Harbor

Harbor is a private notes app and Evernote alternative that its website describes as a second brain you finally own, and own for life. It is designed to capture notes, documents, scans, photos, audio recordings, handwriting and web clips in one place, keep them searchable, and keep them for good. Harbor positions itself as a personal rather than an enterprise product: your data is never sold, mined or shared, and the promise is that your brain stays yours. It runs as native apps on Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Android and the web, plus a CLI, and it opens with a free plan that requires no credit card. The product exists because of a specific frustration. As Harbor puts it, Evernote promised to be your second brain, then broke the promise: prices doubled, the free plan was gutted, the app got slow, and your data got harder to leave with. That story is familiar to many long-term note-takers, and it explains why people hesitate before committing years of notes, scans, photos and recordings to a single service. Harbor's answer is to pick up the original idea — one private place for everything, forever — and to commit to it in writing, with explicit promises about pricing, export and data ownership rather than vague reassurances. Capture is the first half of that promise. The app is built to save anything, in any form: notes, scans, photos, audio and handwriting, plus web clips gathered through the Web Clipper. The website shows this in a domestic scene — a couple sorting their mail and scanning documents together at a sunlit table — with the scanned document then saved in Harbor. The value of capturing in many formats is that you stop deciding in advance what is worth keeping. A receipt, a handwritten page or a voice recording can all go into the same second brain, and the decision about whether it matters can be made later, at the moment you actually need it. Finding is the second half, and it is where Harbor leans most heavily on technology. Harbor reads the words inside your photos, scanned PDFs and even your handwriting, so a short two-word search can surface the exact page you need. The site illustrates this with a search for 'receipt' that returns a Monroe County business tax receipt stored as a PDF, with the matched text — 'FLORIDA LOCAL BUSINESS TAX RECEIPT — issued pursuant to Ch. 205' — shown in context, alongside a scanned 2023 F-250 brake job invoice, from which Harbor has read details such as the 24-month warranty and the next service due. Recordings are handled in the same spirit: your audio becomes searchable transcripts. For anyone who scans paperwork or records spoken notes, this turns an archive of files into something closer to a memory that can actually be queried. Privacy is the third pillar. Harbor lets you turn on zero-knowledge encryption for any note or notebook, so that only you hold the key. The point of applying it selectively is that you can lock down the genuinely sensitive material while keeping everything else fully searchable and AI-ready; the site's example is an encrypted notebook that stays locked until you unlock it. Underpinning this, the security section lists zero-knowledge encryption and privacy by principle, with a commitment that your data is never sold, plus sign-in options that include passkeys, Apple, Google and full device control. Harbor is available everywhere you are. Its apps are described as genuinely native — fast and light, not a web page in a wrapper — and everything works with no signal and syncs the moment you are back online. The listed platforms are Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Android and the web, and the same notes sync across all of them. The Web Clipper extends that reach into the browser: available for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, it can clip a simplified article, a full page, a bookmark or a screenshot, let you mark it up, and then drop it straight into the right notebook without ever leaving the page. That matters because the moment you leave a page to file a clip is usually the moment the clip is lost. Rather than building a weaker assistant into the product, Harbor opens the door to the AI you already pay for. You can connect ChatGPT or Claude, as well as tools such as Cursor, through an API, CLI and MCP, so your assistant can search, add and organize your notes in Harbor. The site's framing is direct: you already pay for ChatGPT or Claude, so instead of paying Harbor for a weaker one baked in, you connect the one you have. Access works with your keys and your data, and can be revoked at any time. The rest of the feature set covers the everyday mechanics of keeping a notebook. Notes and notebooks are deliberately simple, with no Markdown and no clever-tag gymnastics; tasks and reminders sit right next to your notes with due dates, recurrence and priority; templates provide ready-made note structures you build once and reuse; version history saves every change with one-click restore so an edit is never lost; and public links let you share any note read-only, with no account needed to view it. Import and export are treated as core features rather than afterthoughts: one-step import brings an Evernote library in, and full export takes everything out, anytime, in the open. Harbor's distinctive approach is less about any single feature than about the commitments wrapped around them. You are never held hostage: if you stop paying, your account goes read-only and you can still export everything, and delete it. A real API, MCP and one-click export mean you can leave whenever you want, on the explicit logic that Harbor wants you to stay because it is great, not because you are stuck. The pricing itself is framed as a promise: no price increase for three years, then capped at 10% a year. The product is cross-platform, starts free, and is priced as one simple plan. For users, the outcome is a library that behaves the way a second brain should. Everything you save syncs the moment you save it, on every device you own, so the same notes are available on a desktop, on a phone or in the browser, online or offline. Scans, receipts, photos and recordings stop being dead files and become searchable material. Sensitive items can be encrypted while the rest of the library stays usable and available to your own AI tools. And the commercial terms — locked pricing, read-only rather than deleted data, and full export on every plan — mean the cost of committing years of notes to Harbor is bounded in a way the site argues the previous generation of note apps was not. Concrete scenarios from the site include searching a short term such as 'receipt' to pull up a scanned business tax receipt or a vehicle service invoice and immediately see the matched line; scanning household mail and documents as they arrive and filing the results in Harbor; clipping an article from a news site, annotating it and saving it into the right notebook without leaving the browser; turning audio recordings into searchable transcripts so a spoken note can later be found by its words; and importing an entire Evernote library — notebooks, tags, checklists, attachments and clips — in one step when switching over. Shared read-only links cover the case where someone else needs to read a note without creating an account. Harbor is aimed at individuals rather than enterprises: people who keep personal notes, scans and recordings, people who care about privacy and ownership, and in particular people currently considering leaving Evernote — the site offers a dedicated switching path and a one-step importer for notebooks, tags, checklists, attachments and clips. Its integrations are the AI tools you already use, reached through API, CLI and MCP, and its browser extension works in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. Pricing is deliberately simple: a free plan to start with no credit card, and one paid plan, Harbor Unlimited, at $8.25 per month when billed yearly at $99, or monthly, with annual saving 17%. The paid plan includes unlimited notes, notebooks and devices, OCR search, all apps and the Web Clipper, optional zero-knowledge encryption, API, CLI and MCP access, and import and export at any time. In short, Harbor takes the familiar promise of a second brain and attaches guarantees to it: capture in any format, find anything with OCR and transcripts, encrypt what is sensitive, work natively on every device and offline, connect your own AI, and keep the ability to take everything with you. The claim is not that it does more than the alternatives, but that it can be trusted to keep doing it — with the price, the export and the ownership terms written down rather than merely implied.