Agenda - Notes meets Calendar 9+

This makes you pay a yearly fee absolutely no reason.

The app seems functional enough. Theres nothing I found special or anything that warranted special consideration, and that includes a needless mandatory yearly fee. You must pay, at the time of this writing, 25$ once every year to keep your notes. So far I have seen no utility or tool that allows you to bulk download your notes should you elect to discontinue using this app.
Maybe I’ve just been using apps and programs for too long. I’m not middle aged “yet" but I can say most of my life I’ve had a computer. Some applications deserve to be called SaaS, or Software as a Service. A simple note taking app on the Mac app store just like the dozens that came before it is not one of them. The problem with small apps that automatically subscribe to you is if you are at all a busy person with a standard credit card, you forget about fees that only rear their head once a year.
There are plenty of free note apps that sync across devices and backup to iCloud that don’t have a yearly fee, let alone 25$.
The functionality is here, but the price is not. Great marketing, pretty animated graphics… that’s what your subscription will be paying for.
One star based on value with the hope that developers wise up and just charge for a new version of the software every few years.

Developer Response ,

Please let me clarify our sales model: It is not a subscription. We certainly do not charge you automatically each year. We don't use any automatic payments at all.

What's more, the app is actually free to use, forever. If you are happy with the basic features, there is no charge to use it. If you find the premium features we offer useful, you can unlock those. You get all current features — as well as all features introduced in the following year — and you get to keep them forever. They are permanently unlocked.

After your year is up, new features may appear that are again locked, but you are never forced to pay for them. You can choose to pay for them and get another year of premium features, or you can choose to stick with what you already paid for, and keep using those features forever. And even if you don't pay, you get free bug fixes as well as any new features we add that are not 'premium'.

If you decide to you want to stop using the app, we offer export in a number of formats, including HTML, markdown, and a JSON representation for people with scripting skills. So your data is fully available for you to take with you. No lock in.

I hope that has clarified the sales model. Most importantly, it is not a subscription. You pay for concrete features, and can keep those features forever. You are never forced to pay, and can keep using the app as long as you like even if you do not pay.

Useful for some kinds of project tracking & writing

This is a very pretty application which has a good number of features. It's remarkably flexible and in that is the challenge. There isn't really any clear or obvious workflow or application for using it, which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you can do just about anything you want. On the other hand, what do you do with it? I'm giving it only 4 stars primarily for this reason. (I also think the UI is a little less than discoverable, but that's not a major issue here.)

Personally, I'm using it to track a series of small personal projects that take place over time and require a little work here and a little work there. I can capture notes for those projects, todo's, any list of things I need done or things I want to remember later and they are available on all my devices. More flexible than any of the other "to do" systems I use in that regard and since I'm not using for project scheduling, that flexibility is useful to me. I do wish it had different categorizations, state machines, etc, but everyone always wants just one more tiny feature, right?

The licensing and purchase model is also excellent. The app is quite usefull as it sits. The extra features are also useful, the thing you have now, (whatever that is), will continue to work in perpetuity, and the developers are also incentivized to add useful features. it's one of the more well thought out monetization schemes I've seen for any software.