This is a no-go for me: if the company that builds the product goes down, the last thing I want is my personal notes, links, and bookmarks to go down with it with no easy way to get them out. Many of the products above either lack an API to programmatically import/export/read data, or they put their APIs behind some premium tiers.In most cases, you have to pay a monthly/yearly fee for something as simple as storing and syncing text.In most cases, those products fall into the note-taking category or web scraper/saver category, rarely both.I've tried many of them over the following years (Instapaper, Pocket, Readability, Mercury Reader, SpringPad, Google Keep, OneNote, Dropbox Paper.), but eventually got dissatisfied by most of them: Yes, ideally, I want something that can do both: your digital brain consists of both of the notes you've taken and the links you've saved. So I started my journey as a wanderer of note-taking and link-saving services. If Evernote was supposed to be my second brain, then I should have been able to take it with me wherever I wanted, without having to worry about how many devices I was using it already, without having to fear future changes or more aggressive monetization policies that could have limited my ability to use the product.
I could not compromise with a product that would charge me $5 more a month just to have it running on an additional device, especially when the product itself didn't look that solid to me. Moreover, Evernote experienced data losses, security breaches, and privacy controversies that, in my eyes, made it unfit to handle something as precious as the notes from my life and my work. Evernote had a primitive API, a primitive web clipper, no Linux client, and, as it tried harder and harder to monetize its product, it put more and more features behind expensive tiers. If Evernote was supposed to be my second brain, then it should have been very simple to synchronize it with my filesystem and across multiple devices, but that wasn't as simple as it sounds. I have been a happy Evernote user until ~5-6 years ago when I realized that the company had run out of ideas, and I could no longer compromise with its decisions. All of this content used to be sparse across many devices, it was painful to sync, and then Evernote came like water in a desert. By then, I already had tons of bookmarks, text files with read-it-later links, notes I had taken across multiple devices, sketches I had taken on physical paper, and drafts of articles or papers I was working on. When Evernote launched the idea of an online notebook as a sort of "second brain" more than a decade ago, it resonated so much with what I had been trying to achieve for a while.
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