SMF·EVERNOTE
Can a prompt replace Evernote?
Notes & knowledge management — capture + notes
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
A personal notes app with tags, attachments, OCR on scanned images, and full-text search is a real weekend build. What doesn't come with it is Evernote's actual moat: years of accumulated notes and switching cost, mature sync across every device, and a browser clipper refined over a decade.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on30.07.2026Build a personal notes app: Markdown notes with tags, edited with a live preview. Support attachments — dropping a file or image onto a note stores it and links it back; run OCR on uploaded images and PDF pages so scans and receipts become searchable, not just their filenames. Build full-text search across both note content and OCR'd attachment text. Add a simple web-clipper bookmarklet (not a browser extension) that posts the current page's title, URL, and selected text into a new note. Write a one-off importer for Evernote's own export format so existing notes, tags, and attachments actually move in. Support a scheduled export of everything to plain Markdown files plus their attachments, so nothing is ever trapped in the app.
Do not build mobile apps, real-time cross-device sync, or a full browser extension — a bookmarklet and a working import path are the honest, complete scope for a personal capture tool.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 a polished browser and mobile clipper
- B.2 mobile apps
- B.3 mature cross-device sync
- B.4 import/export edge cases handled over years
- B.5 the reliability of a product that has outlasted most of its competitors
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: sync/capture ecosystem
People pay because all their old notes, scans, and clipped pages are already there — the switching cost of years of accumulated data is the real product, not the notes editor itself.
Questions
Can I import my existing Evernote notes?
Yes — Evernote exports to its own .enex format, and the prompt includes an importer that reads notes, tags, and attachments from it.
Will it work on my phone?
As a responsive web page, yes, if hosted somewhere reachable, but there's no offline mobile app and no camera-based scan capture the way Evernote's app has.
What does it cost to run?
Hosting and a database, typically a few dollars a month — OCR runs locally at no extra cost.
What's the one thing that doesn't survive the rebuild?
Years of refined capture. Evernote's web clipper and mobile scanning have been tuned for over a decade to handle edge cases cleanly; a bookmarklet and a basic OCR pass cover the common case, not all of them.
Related tools
Receipt