Buy once instead of Notion

6 apps in the directory cover what people use Notion for. 4 of them are a one-time purchases, and 2 cost nothing at all.

Read the catch on each one before you switch — a one-time price is not automatically the better deal, and we say so where it is not.

The replacements

local-first markdown vault, free with no feature gates

Free Free

Multi-device sync is $48 a year unless you wire up iCloud or git yourself

markdown writing app built around citations and Pandoc

Free Open source

Export beyond HTML needs Pandoc, and PDF needs a LaTeX install on top

live-preview markdown editing for $14.99, three activations

$14.99 This version

A major version jump like 1.x to 2.x can require paying again

date-based notes where unlocked features stay unlocked

$34.99 Lifetime tier

The one-time unlock covers today's features plus one year of new ones, not everything after that

research database for documents, mail and scans that stays yours

$99 Paid upgrades

Updates stop after a year unless you pay to extend; the version you have keeps working forever

expensive, perpetual, and unmatched for notes that have to do work

$289 Paid upgrades

A year of upgrades is included, then a new version costs $98 or $83 a year to stay current