Why we built Ideas! instead of another Evernote
Last month, a podcaster emailed to say she'd stopped using Evernote after seven years. Not because Evernote was broken. Because she'd spent thirty minutes searching for a show idea she'd captured three weeks prior, scattered across four nested folders and three different notebooks. She found it eventually. By then, the moment had passed.
The weight of infinite flexibility
Evernote is powerful. I mean that genuinely. It can be a notebook, a journal, a project tracker, a recipe box, a personal archive. That flexibility is also its burden. When everything is possible, nothing feels urgent. You open Evernote to capture an idea and face the first decision: which notebook? Then the second: should this become a project? A task? A saved article? By the time you've decided, the idea has cooled.
Ideas! is different by necessity. We built it for creators who make with purpose: pastors developing sermons, podcasters hunting for the next episode angle, writers capturing fragments that might become something. These people don't need Evernote's kitchen sink. They need speed. One place. Done.
The difference shows in the details. With Ideas!, you open the app and a single button sits ready. Tap it. Speak. Your voice converts to text on your device, privately, instantly. No folders to navigate. No decision tree. Just capture.
Privacy that costs nothing extra
When we designed the voice capture system, we chose on-device transcription deliberately. Your voice never leaves your phone. It's processed locally using Apple's built-in speech recognition, which means faster transcription, zero cloud lag, and no monthly fee buried in a privacy policy.
Evernote does voice notes too. But they're processed on Evernote's servers, which is fine if you're comfortable with that. We simply decided our users should own their ideas from the moment they speak them. That choice shaped everything else.
The free tier reflects this philosophy. You get ten ideas, voice capture, transcription, search, and categories. No ads. No nag screens. No upgrade pressure. We wanted creators to try the core experience without paying. If you capture more than ten ideas a month, the Creator tier at £4.99 unlocks unlimited capture and cloud sync across your devices. If you want board analytics and priority support, that's the Pro tier at £9.99.
Evernote's free tier is more limited, and Evernote Premium jumps to £8.99 monthly just for offline access and a few extra searches. The pricing isn't the story though. The story is that Ideas! respects your ideas as private by default.
One tool, one purpose, actually works
Here's what Ideas! is not: a project manager, a journaling app, a collaborative document editor, or a general-purpose note archive. We've been ruthless about scope. That ruthlessness is the feature.
A YouTuber once told us she'd tried using Evernote for video ideas but kept mixing them with recipe clippings and holiday planning notes. The signal got lost in the noise. She switched to Ideas! and suddenly her creative workflow had a home. Ideas come in via voice or typed text. She tags them by series or topic. She searches them instantly. She develops the best ones into scripts. Then she actions them. The full loop lives in one place.
Evernote excels at being many things. Ideas! excels at being the thing you reach for when inspiration strikes. That focus matters more than you'd think. A coach building an online course doesn't need nested notebooks and smart folders. They need to capture client stories, lesson ideas, and motivational fragments without context-switching. They need to find them later without hunting.
The community voting board, available in the Creator tier, adds one more layer: shared validation. Upload ten ideas to the board. Your audience votes on which ones matter. You get data. You make better bets on what to create next. Evernote has no equivalent because Evernote isn't built for makers who publish. Ideas! is.
The sync question: cloud without compromise
Evernote syncs across devices using its own infrastructure. It works well, and you trust Evernote with your data. We chose differently: iCloud sync through Apple's ecosystem. If you use an iPhone, iPad, and Mac, your ideas sync smoothly, encrypted, with no middleman.
This matters because it means you're not paying Evernote a subscription for the privilege of owning your own notes. Your data lives in your iCloud account. You can export anytime. You're not locked in. The Creator tier includes this sync. Evernote charges extra.
We knew this choice would narrow our audience. Ideas! works best if you're in the Apple ecosystem. That was intentional. We'd rather build something exceptional for the people we serve than something mediocre for everyone.
Why we're not Evernote, and why that's the point
A few weeks after launch, someone asked if we'd add note hierarchies, saved web clippings, and collaborative editing. The answer is no. Not because we couldn't build them. Because Ideas! would stop being Ideas! and start being another note-taking app trying to be everything.
Evernote is the right choice for people who want one tool for multiple purposes. But if you're a creator who captures ideas frequently, Evernote often feels like overkill. You use 20 percent of its features and navigate around the other 80 percent.
Ideas! is the opposite. It's 100 percent of what a creator needs to capture, organise, and action ideas, and nothing you'll never use. The voice capture is instant. The search is fast. The community board shows you what resonates. The pricing is simple. The data is yours.
The podcaster who emailed us last month? She's back to capturing ideas daily. She finds them in seconds. She makes better episodes. She's paying £39.99 a year for that clarity.
If you've felt the weight of Evernote's flexibility, or you've never used it because it seemed like overkill, maybe Ideas! is worth trying. Try the free tier for a month. Capture ten ideas. See if focus feels better than choice.