Why we retired the free plan

We used to have a free plan. Not anymore. If you're new here: Notenz is now Guardian only, EUR 3.99 a month or EUR 29.99 a year (EUR 2.50 a month billed annually). If you were already using Notenz for free, we've moved your account to Guardian at no cost for six months, and we'll email you well before that changes.

Here's why we did it, and why we think it makes Notenz better, not worse.

The free tier was a trap, for you and for us

A free plan sounds generous. In practice, ours was thin by design: one note, one recipient, no file uploads, no SMS alerts, monthly check-ins only. Just enough to try the idea, not enough to actually protect anything real. Anyone who wanted to store a real password vault, a will, or instructions for their family had to upgrade anyway.

That's not really a free plan. That's a demo with an upsell built into every screen. We don't like using that pattern on people, and we don't think you should have to see it either.

What a free tier costs a product like this

Notenz is a dead man's switch. Its entire job is to sit quietly for months or years and then work correctly, once, when you can no longer respond. That's a different kind of product than most software. It has to stay reliable on a timescale of decades, not quarters.

Supporting a free tier means spending engineering time on crippled versions of features, on upgrade nudges, on billing edge cases for people who will never pay. Every hour spent on that is an hour not spent on the thing that actually matters: making sure the check-in fires, the reminder reaches you, and the vault reaches the right people if your check-ins stop.

We'd rather spend that time making Guardian excellent for everyone who uses Notenz, instead of spreading it thin across tiers of varying usefulness.

One plan means no upsell games

With Guardian as the only plan, every Notenz customer gets the same thing: unlimited recipients, file uploads up to 250 MB, the zero-knowledge Sealed Vault, Two-Person Secret, QR-Vault, Trusted Contact alerts, and a 24-hour recall window if something executes by mistake. Nobody is stuck wondering whether the feature they need is behind a paywall three steps into setting things up. There's one price, and it's on the homepage.

Why this matters more for a company like ours

Most software can afford to disappoint a free user. If a note-taking app's free tier gets worse, you lose a few notes and move on. Notenz is holding onto things that matter: passwords, account access, a message to your family, instructions your partner will need. If we ever ran out of runway because we spent years supporting a free tier that never converted, whatever you stored with us stops being reliable at exactly the moment it needs to work.

A single, paid, well-supported plan is what lets us commit to running this for decades. That's not a marketing line. It's the actual reason the free plan is gone.

What happens if you were on the free plan

If you signed up before today, you don't need to do anything right now. We've moved your account to Guardian, no charge, for six months. You'll get everything Guardian includes during that window: unlimited recipients, file uploads, the Sealed Vault, and the rest. We'll email you ahead of time before the six months end. If you don't subscribe by then, your account moves to a read-only "frozen" state. Nothing is deleted. You can still view your vault; you just can't add or edit anything until you resubscribe.

If you decide Guardian isn't for you, you can export your full vault as a plain, readable file from Settings at any time.

What doesn't change

Guardian has no trial and never has. What it does have is a 30-day money-back guarantee: if it's not right for you, tell us within 30 days of paying and we'll refund it, no questions asked, as long as your vault hasn't already executed. And the advisor program for financial advisors, notaries, and estate planners is unchanged: EUR 18 per client per year, minimum five clients.