Proton acquires encrypted note-taking app Standard Notes

Proton acquires Standard Notes. The encrypted note-taking app will become part of Proton, but the company claims it won't change how Standard Notes works or how much it costs. Proton has long wanted to become a competitor of Google, with its own office suite.

Proton says that Standard Notes will become part of the company. Both companies would have the same values ​​around privacy and anonymity and could therefore work well together on 'our joint mission', Proton writes. Standard Notes will be 'complementary' to the Proton ecosystem, but Proton does not say anything about possible integration of services.

Proton writes that Standard Notes will remain free and open source and that the program will continue to receive software support. The prices won't change either, it sounds. Existing subscribers will also not have to deal with price increases. Proton has made a similar deal before in the past; the company previously also acquired SimpleLogin. This is still available as a standalone service.

Standard Notes is an app that allows users to take encrypted notes. The software is popular among privacy fans, but the developer has long struggled to be profitable. The service has about 300,000 users, although it is not known how many of them pay for the service. In addition to a free package, Standard Notes also has two paid packages, which have increased in price in recent years. While the Productivity package was introduced two years ago for $75 per year, it now costs $90. Standard Notes once had a five-year subscription, but that has now been discontinued.

It is striking that Proton does not seem to want to integrate Standard Notes' services into its products. The company eventually wants to offer a privacy-friendly alternative to office suites such as Google Drive and Microsoft 365, CEO Andy Yen told Tweakers in 2022. In the long term, the company also wants to offer its own online word processor within Proton Drive, which currently only contains a cloud service. In theory, Standard Notes could play a role in this, but both companies are not saying anything about this for the time being.