In my seemingly endless quest to eliminate as many software subscriptions as I can, my notes app was next on the chopping block.

I was a heavy user of Evernote's basic features and almost nothing else, yet I remained on a premium plan for the unlimited notes, notebooks, and file attachments.

Along with heavy AI integration and new features of questionable utility to me, Evernote bumped up its prices.

I stayed put for a while because moving years of notes seemed like more work than simply paying a small bill. I already knew I wasn't getting the best value for my note-taking money.

Evernote had become the clearest example of a habit I wanted to break, which is letting subscriptions hold my work hostage.

So when my last subscription ended, I canceled my plan. I already had an alternative in mind: Obsidian, with my notes stored on hardware I own.

How Obsidian works

It's a pretty sharp tool

Obsidian keeps everything in a vault, which is a folder on your device. Every note inside it is a plain Markdown file that any text editor can open.

That much I knew going in, and it's what everyone leads with. What sold me was what the app does after the notes are written.

Linking is the basis of everything. Typing two square brackets and a note name creates a link, and Obsidian records the connection at the other end automatically.

A note about a project now shows me every other note that mentions it, without me setting up anything. Evernote could link notes as well, but I had to copy an internal link and paste it in by hand, with no backlinking.

On top of that is a graph view, which draws the whole vault as connected points. I use it less than I expected, though it's a good visualization of your note mapping.

The plugin system is another exceptional feature. Obsidian has a couple of thousand community plugins covering tasks, calendars, tables, and many more.

Evernote has no plugin system, so you're stuck with whatever it offers.

Evernote is better at some things. Its web clipper is more polished, and its search reads text inside images and PDFs, which Obsidian will not do without help.

I rarely clip pages, and I was paying a premium partly for features like those.

The catch with Obsidian is cross-device syncing. A vault is a local folder, so nothing moves between devices unless you arrange it yourself, and Obsidian sells its own service to solve exactly that.

However, paying a subscription to escape a subscription was definitely the wrong move.

My sync workflow

Choosing the hard way to skip the subscription

I looked first at pairing Obsidian with a cloud drive, which is the common approach and works perfectly well. But I did not want to rebuild my notes on top of a Google product I was already paying for.

The Raspberry Pi in the corner of my house was already running Nextcloud. I had quit paying for storage with a Pi cloud backup system months earlier. Adding a folder for the vault literally costs nothing.

Remote access was already handled as well, since Tailscale takes care of that side. The notes sync whether I am at home or not, which is more than I expected from a machine sitting under a shelf.

Getting Obsidian to connect with Nextcloud is where people tend to make mistakes. The Nextcloud Android app looks like the obvious route, but it's the wrong one.

Its sync option pulls changes from the server without reliably pushing local edits back up.

Two-way folder sync has been an open request on that app for years, so anyone who assumes it works finds that their phone edits never reach the desktop.

The plugin that makes it work is Remotely Save. It connects Obsidian to Nextcloud over WebDAV from inside the app, so syncing does not depend on a second app behaving.

I installed it on the phone and the PC, entered my Nextcloud server credentials, and pointed both at the same folder. That was the entire configuration.

I know a server is one more thing that can break, and the person who has to fix it late at night is me.

That's a trade I'm willing to take, since nobody can raise the price of a Pi I already own. And for what it's worth, the server has been running reliably for months now.

The migration process

Years in, hours out

Canceling on its own was never going to be enough. Evernote caps its free tier at 50 notes and one notebook, so dropping the subscription meant leaving the service completely.

I had years of notes stacked up and assumed the extraction would take up an entire weekend, so I prepared for a miserable time.

Evernote's export tool handled the first half. It packaged everything into ENEX, its in-house format, and I only had to wait for it to finish.

The second half was what I really dreaded. Obsidian doesn't read ENEX, and neither do a lot of other software, so they had to be converted before I could do anything with them.

Digging through the Obsidian forum pointed me at Yarle. It is a free desktop converter that turns ENEX files into Markdown, and it worked through the export without complaint.

It is not completely hands-off, though. Tags, creation dates, and notebook names only carry across if you set up a template, so it's best to read the configuration notes instead of running the tool blind.

I moved the finished Markdown into my vault, and Obsidian indexed it quickly. A few internal links needed rewriting, and Evernote's richer formatting did not survive the conversion, but that wasn't much of an issue.

Owning the files turned out to be the point

The setup has worked really well. Notes I write on the phone are waiting on the PC by the time I open it, and Obsidian's note-linking has also been more useful to me than anything Evernote added in the past few years.

I went in assuming Obsidian needs plugins to work well on mobile. It really does not, but I've been having fun trying different plugins and customizations to make things a little smoother.

At the end of it, I saved money on another subscription. But the real win was the satisfaction of knowing that my notes are stored on my own hardware as plain files, not strictly tied to Obsidian's platform.