At Proton, we have always been highly disciplined, focusing on how to best sustain our mission over time. This job is incredibly difficult. Everything we create always takes longer and is more complex than it would be if we did it without focusing on privacy, and we generally have to do it with fewer resources. This also makes it a path that we walk alone as few other teams share our commitment to privacy and community and, therefore, understand the unique challenges we face day after day.
But we also know that making privacy the default online will take more than just us, which is why we’re always very excited to meet like-minded teams that are purpose and community-driven. In 2022, we met the team from SimpleLogin and joined forces, and today, we’re happy to announce that Standard Notes will also join us to advance our shared mission.
Standard Notes, as the name suggests, is an end-to-end encrypted note-taking application, available on mobile and desktop, that is used by over 300,000 people. Our personal notes often contain some of our most intimate and sensitive data, and protecting them with end-to-end encryption ensures that they always remain accessible only to you. This really makes Standard Notes complementary to the Proton ecosystem of services, and it is one that we have long used ourselves and are excited to introduce to the Proton community.
What does this mean for Proton and Standard Notes users?
Both Proton and Standard Notes share a strong commitment to our communities, so Standard Notes will remain open source, freely available, and fully supported. Prices are not changing, and if you have a current subscription to Standard Notes, it will continue to be honored. Proton aspires to do the right thing and be a responsible home for open-source projects, and just as we did with SimpleLogin, we are committed to preserving what makes Standard Notes special and much loved.
In the coming months, we hope to find ways to make Standard Notes more easily accessible to the Proton community. This way, in addition to protecting your email, calendar, files, passwords, and online activity, you can also protect your notes.
Why Standard Notes
Proton has long been guided by our unique values. We’ve always believed in putting people ahead of profits, from our start as a crowdfunded project created by scientists who met at CERN right up to the present day as we safeguard the privacy of over 100 million people. It’s not hard enough to run a long-lasting and durable privacy company — even fewer have managed to do it without venture capital or other outside investors.
Standard Notes has been around since 2017 and has withstood the test of time. Standard Notes has also grown without venture capital funding and has demonstrated a commitment towards serving its community. This alignment in values is rare, and creates a natural fit to work together. We are proud to have the entire Standard Notes team join us on our journey, and we look forward to learning from them and growing stronger together. But most of all, we look forward to continuing to serve both the Proton and Standard Notes communities together in the years to come.
I really liked how they handled the SimpleLogin acquisition, the SimpleLogin team has been doing such good work on Proton Pass.
I hope this acquisition will be a similar situation!
Proton Notes? 
Pretty soon, we could be looking at a full-fledged private ecosystem that completely destroys the competition. 
Hell yeah. And we need Proton Mobile OS also They should acquire Fairphone to also have own phone. And some eBook platform and readers, and … Boy the fantasies 
Honestly, Proton really is just becoming the Google suite alternative. I’ve been recommending it as such for a while now, so I’m happy they keep expanding to fill it. All they really need now is Proton Docs/Sheets/Slides, Proton Tasks, & Proton Search.
Proton browser? Maybe not. We have Firefox and Brave Browser.
Me too Jodie 
But one thing proton need to do is fix their consistent inconsistent software on all platforms.
I meant more a search engine, but I do agree, I don’t see them building a browser.
I think this means Proton Drive will finally get good, which would be pretty sweet.
Am not a fan of mergers most of the time, but as long as Proton doesn’t gut the SN team and maybe integrates them into the Proton family like they have SimpleLogin, it should be fine
Actually…
if they essentially make the private version of Chrome with Google account but Proton Browser with Proton services readily built in? It’s all stored local, but can then sync with a Proton account? No messing around with extensions or anything? That has potential to be an easy recommendation for people.
I’m excited for this news!
My notes journey was on Google Keep Notes for the longest time, until I decided to have to something E2EE. Which led me to using Joplin with encrypted notes syncing to Microsoft OneDrive. 5GB of free text storage. But something about Joplin’s old design language made me wanna switch. So I switched to Standard Notes! 100MB of plain text notes! Plenty for me
Back in Late November, I started being a subscriber to Proton Unlimited. Proton Unlimited also serves as a SimpleLogin subscription, which likely means, it’ll soon work as a Standard Notes subscription! Which is awesome! I’d love to have the revision history for my notes. Super excited to see this integration roll out.
If we somehow see a Proton Browser in the future, it will probably be something like Mullvad browser, a browser created on top of Firefox. So, it would require less maintenance. The sphere is so crowded but sometimes efforts are duplicated because it’s done by community. However, companies will take into account efficiency and ship better products. I believe partnerships can be valuable along with mergers, which is less popular because of disagreements in privacy community.
For now there are not usable for me.
- The 100MB storage limit feels ridiculous. ProtonMail offers 500MB basic with 1GB free upgrade, and ProtonDrive starts at 2GB up to 5GB free. It’s unclear why Standard Notes storage isn’t shared like these other Proton products.
- Basic formatting tools like bold and italics are absent on free plan. What makes it different from notes in Proton Pass?
- Jurisdictional troubles. It is not Swiss as Proton or SimpleLogin
P.S: Their app looks like PWA (progressive web application) not as standalone app.
Hope this will be addressed…
Considering the merger just got announced, it’ll probably take a minute for any product mergers to happen
I’m pretty sure Standard Notes Apps (or at least the desktop app) are based on Electron. I’m pretty sure that Proton’s desktop app is also based on Electron already, not sure about the mobile apps.