Get your notes back as files you own.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
Why people move from Evernote
The specific reasons people give for switching.
Plain files, not a proprietary container
Every note is a .md file in a folder you chose. Open them in any editor, search them with Spotlight, back them up with everything else. Nothing needs Evernote to be readable.
No plan tiers and no device limits
TypeFire Notes is free with no note count, no upload quota and no device restriction on the free tier. Pro is $18 once for three Macs.
It opens instantly
Local files, a windowed list and two-tier search. A 10,000 note vault lists in 214 milliseconds on a release build.
Capture without opening the app
One keystroke writes a note straight into your folder, which is the Evernote habit most people miss when they leave.
Search from inside other apps
Control Command Shift K searches every note from on top of Mail or Slack and pastes into the document you are already writing.
Your notes never touch our servers
There is no TypeFire cloud. Sync, if you turn it on, runs Mac to Mac through your own iCloud.
TypeFire compared with Evernote
Prices and capabilities as of August 2026.
| TypeFire | Evernote | |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | Plain .md files you own | Proprietary, cloud |
| Free tier limits | None on notes | Note and device limits |
| Price | Free, Pro $18 once | Subscription |
| Web clipper | No | Yes, very good |
| OCR in images | Yes, on device, in clips | Yes, server-side |
| Mobile apps | No | Yes |
| Global hotkey over other apps | Yes | No |
Where Evernote is genuinely better
Three things Evernote does better. If any of them is your deciding factor, use Evernote.
The web clipper
Evernote's clipper is still one of the best pieces of software in this category, and TypeFire has nothing equivalent for saving web pages.
It is everywhere
Windows, Mac, web, iOS and Android with sync included. TypeFire is a Mac app.
Scanning and document handling
Evernote handles scanned documents, PDFs and business cards in ways a markdown vault does not attempt.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in Evernote at any price.
Notes as files
Readable in any editor, forever, with no export step required.
A global hotkey
Search and paste a note from inside whatever app you are in.
A text expander
Abbreviations that expand across the whole Mac, including inside a note.
A clipboard manager
Everything you copied, searchable by the words inside screenshots.
Turn anything you copy into something you type
Right-click a clip, choose Save as snippet, give it an abbreviation. The thing you copied once becomes something you type three characters to get, forever. The same conversions run across all three surfaces: a clip becomes a note, and a note you keep rewriting becomes a snippet. Clipboard managers have no snippet engine, text expanders do not watch your clipboard, and no note app has either, which is why the loop only closes here.
- 01
Copy something
It lands in Clips alongside everything else you copied today.
- 02
Save as snippet
It leaves your rolling history and enters your permanent library.
- 03
Give it a trigger
Type
invfrom then on and never look it up again.
A clipboard manager you can tell what to ignore
A clipboard manager sees everything you copy. Until 4.0 the only control over that was a password-manager exclusion you could not see. There are three now, none of them gated, and the limits of the strongest one are stated rather than buried.
Turn image capture off
One switch. Text keeps being captured and pictures stop. Images you have already saved are kept rather than deleted, which is not what most people expect a privacy toggle to do, so it is worth saying.
Name apps to skip
Add any application and TypeFire ignores what you copy in it. Choose from the apps it has already seen, with clip counts, or browse to any app on your Mac. Each app gets one of three settings: allow it, block images only, or block everything you copy there. The middle one is what most people want for a work tool, keeping the text and losing the screenshots.
The password managers, now visible
TypeFire has always ignored password managers. That list is in Settings now, twenty-three apps including 1Password, Bitwarden, KeePassXC, Dashlane and Apple Passwords, blocked by bundle ID in code rather than by a setting you have to find. It shows which of them you have installed, and any one can be overridden.
Encrypted database, owner-only files
Clips are stored in an encrypted SQLite database on your Mac. The key is generated on your machine and kept in the macOS Keychain. Image files sit alongside the database with owner-only permissions.
Secrets expire in minutes
Card numbers and high-entropy strings are detected and deleted after five minutes by default, adjustable in Settings. Everything else follows the retention you choose.
An on-device AI option
Apple Intelligence and local models through Ollama or LM Studio run entirely on your machine. If you pick Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini instead, text goes to that provider directly; TypeFire operates no server in that path.
Where blocking by app stops being a guarantee
macOS does not tell an application which other application wrote to the clipboard. TypeFire matches on the app that was in front at the time, plus any app that identifies itself using the standard convention. That covers the overwhelming majority of real cases and it is not absolute. The protection that does not depend on a guess is the concealed-content marker: password managers mark what they copy, and TypeFire never stores it whatever else is set.
The app list also covers what you copy, not screenshots you save as a file. A PNG on your desktop records nothing about what was on screen, so TypeFire matches those to an app where it can and skips them when it does. It is right in the ordinary case and it is not a promise: to keep saved screenshots out entirely, turn off Save screenshots to Clips.
Eighteen dollars. Once.
TypeFire Pro is a single payment that unlocks unlimited clips, Selection Prompts, Prompt Chains, notes sync and note version history. There is no subscription and no per-seat pricing.
Free tier, then one payment
No free tier at all
One time
No free tier
One time
Lifetime, or $3.99/mo
Subscription, forever
Two months of Paste, or all of TypeFire.
Moving from Evernote
Still not answered?
Export your notebooks from Evernote as ENEX or HTML, convert them to markdown with a tool such as Yarle or Pandoc, and put the resulting .md files in a folder.
Point TypeFire at that folder and it opens them in place with no further import. Formatting survives well; deeply nested tables and some attachments need checking by hand.
TypeFire Notes is free with no note limit, no upload quota and no device restriction, and it stores notes as plain markdown files you own.
Apple Notes is also free and syncs to iPhone. Obsidian is free for personal use and more capable for linked thinking.
Basic formatting, headings, lists, links and inline images convert cleanly to markdown.
What tends not to survive is Evernote-specific structure such as complex nested tables and some embedded attachments, because markdown has no equivalent. Convert a single notebook first and check it before moving everything.
No. If saving web pages is central to how you work, Evernote's clipper is genuinely excellent and TypeFire does not replace it.
TypeFire's clipboard manager keeps everything you copy, including images and the text inside screenshots, which covers some of the same ground.
No. TypeFire is a Mac application and sync runs Mac to Mac through your own iCloud.
If phone access matters, Evernote or Apple Notes cover it and TypeFire does not.
Notes you can still open in ten years.
Plain markdown in a folder you chose, one keystroke from every app on your Mac. Free, with no note limits.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
⌃⌘⇧V your clips⌃⌘⇧T your snippets