Introducing Joplin Cloud Beta Program!

News
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Joplin Cloud Beta Program

The beta is now closed. The beta program helped narrow down a few issues and should make Joplin Cloud (and Joplin Server) more reliable. More precisely:

  • About 7 bugs have been fixed, including two major ones regarding sharing, and one security issue.

  • About a dozen improvements, new features and optimisations have been added following your feedback.

As promised if you have a beta account you can keep using it and it will remain free for the three months after the account was created. After that, you will receive a link to start the Stripe subscription if you wish to keep using the account.

If you have sent me an email before the end of the beta and I didn't reply yet, I will do so soon, and will send you the confirmation email.

Thanks everyone for participating!

Joplin Cloud is a fully managed Joplin Server hosting. It is based on Joplin Server v2 and thus provides all of its functionalities, including sharing notes and notebooks, and other Joplin-specific features. Over time it will also receive additional features that are not possible using generic sync targets.

I'm planning to launch the service quite soon but first I am looking for beta testers willing to give it a try. You would get either a free Basic or Pro account, as you prefer. All participants will get the first 3 months for free (even after the beta period is ended) (*).

The Basic plan has a 10MB limit per item, and the note sharing feature. It will most likely be 1.99€ per month.

The Pro plan has a 200MB limit per item, and the note sharing feature, plus collaboration on notes via notebook sharing. It should be 5.99€ per month.

How to sign up

If you are interested, contact me (or send a PM) and let me know your email address, and whether you need the Basic or Pro account, and I'll create your account.

If you have any question please let me know!

FAQ

How safe is it during the beta period?

The server has already been used by several users over the past few months so it should be quite safe. For extra safety, you can also install the Backup Plugin. Moreover, there's a daily backup of the Joplin Cloud server in case there's any issue.

What happens after the 3 free months are over?

You can either continue using the service by paying the monthly subscription, or cancel it. If you choose to continue using it, you can keep all your notes as they are. If you cancel, you can easily switch to a different service and of course keep your notes since they are all on your computer. The notes on Joplin Cloud will become read-only.

How to reports bugs?

Either here or GitHub is fine.

Will there be a free tier?

I thought about making the Basic plan free, but in the end I've decided against it because the purpose of this website is to provide fully managed hosting. And for free it's already possible to either self-host or use Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. Unlike other note taking apps, which have only one sync service, and thus needs a free tier to get users, Joplin has already plenty of free options, so creating another one didn't seem necessary.

For now I've set a rather low limit per item for the Basic plan but I may increase it once I get more metrics about the server performance and storage cost.

Are there any known bugs?

As of now, there are no known issue.

(*) Only one free account per person. Accounts that have not been active during the beta program (no sync operations), will be closed at the end of it.

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I'd encourage you get in contact with a lawyer to improve upon the TOS & Privacy Policy, otherwise there's some low hanging fruit you could tackle (you've typo'd your name in the privacy policy for example!) mostly about giving yourself some leeway (Removing the PostgreSQL comment as it's an implementation detail that could change at any point and isn't relevant to privacy, not stating information is never shared at all to allow you to integrate other services in the future such as CDN, etc).

Legal stuff aside, I'd probably also set up a global storage limit per account as well as per item, or you might find yourself used as a more generic file host than just notes, and being E2E, it'd be hard to tell who was storing big notes and who was storing pirated TV episodes for example.

Otherwise, good luck! I think you have a good chance of making this sustainable.

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Thanks for the feedback. I want to wait a bit to see how things are going before contacting a lawyer as I assume it's not going to be cheap, although I could certainly fix my own name! And indeed I'll also remove the Postgres mention.

Good point about using the service as storage space. I see Evernote doesn't have such a limit but their data is not encrypted so presumably they can prevent abuse by scanning attachments, which I cannot do. So thanks, I'll look into this and maybe put in a storage limit per account.

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Evernote have a monthly upload limit on their accounts which limits storage somewhat.

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This is really good news :slight_smile: While I won't be able to join, having a first party hosting provider as an option is a great thing. :slight_smile:

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This is awesome news.

I assume that many of the Joplin users may be interested in a self hosting server solution on their Mac or otherwise at home and use a local sync. I am one of these users, but I am not knowledgeable enough to implement it myself.

Is there a chance someone can write a script or instructions how to implement such a local sync - perhaps utilizing Joplin 2.0 server ?

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I quit Evernote about 10 years ago, because I was looking for 1GB with full syncing, for 12$/year. This sounds perfect.

I would be interested in beta testing the collaboration feature, but I would probably downgrade once the free trial is over. For what little collaboration I do, I will probably just keep using Google Drive, rather than pay an extra 48$/ year for just collaboration. (My whole note collection is less than 70MB)

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That sounds good, and indeed the Basic plan would be a good choice for your note collection is relatively small. If you'd like to register, could you send me in a PM the email address you'd like to use?

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@laurent
Will we be able to open several notes at the same time on Joplin Cloud by opening them in several tabs?

This for me in the current major drawback when using Joplin, compared with using Evernote.

If so, I will gladly be a Beta Tester and in the future a paying customer.

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There's no plan for this at the moment. The goal of the service is note collaboration, more performant sync, and possibly other features later on. But being able to edit notes on the service is not planned yet.

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I'm speaking of opening the notes in read-only. I want to be able to read information from several notes. Speccialy if they are related.

This is possible, right?

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To do this, you could share multiple notes, and each would give you a url. Then indeed you can open them all at the same time in the browser and they'll be read-only.

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If you want to export notes as a website, you can try joplin-blog cli, which can export blog/wiki websites according to tags (combined with hexo/vuepress/ docsify and other existing tools).

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How do I switch over? I currently use Dropbox syncing. Should I just switch over every client and expect it to work? Should I switch over one client, wipe all the others, and do a fresh sync for the others?

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First make a backup to be sure, but you should be able to switch every client and it should work. I would suggest to at least complete a full sync with one of them before switching the others.

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I'm seeing something, and not sure if this is normal.

I have about 250 notes, and synched every client using Dropbox before starting.
I switched over one computer, and turned on E2EE. It synced 500-ish items.
I switched over my laptop, and it asked for my E2EE password. It synched over about 1000 files.
I switched over my phone, and it synched about 2000 files.

Is this normal? I don't see any duplicate notes in the client, but the server contains about 2000 files. Maybe it's because I turned on E2EE while switching sync targets, or because the first computer triggered a normal sync while the other two were syncing? (It was syncing every 5 minutes)

Note: I do have backups, so I can easily wipe and start over if that helps.

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It's a very trusting setup, allowing unlimited attachments for one flat fee. I too would suggest you set a monthly limit because before you know it, you might be the host of terabytes of illegal (or worse) freely shareable files.... And once you promise certain features, you can't turn back on them later.

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What does the sync status screen says on each device? (Under Help > Synchronisation Status, and Sync Status button in options on mobile)

I'm guessing that since you've switched the sync target on each device it saw that as a first sync and uploaded all the items, then each upload generates a change object, which is then downloaded. So the downloads you see might just be the change objects, and that's normal. Once all devices are synced it should work as expected.

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Yes I'll add some kind of limit before the end of the beta. I'm thinking something like 1GB for the Basic account and 5GB for the Pro account initially.