It’s been some years since Joplin Cloud had a price increase, and it seems to me that features have been added. I use Note Publish a lot, and it is very useful. However, I was fairly shocked when the price jumped for me by 56%, and I wasn’t notified at all or warned. My cost for basic in US dollars went from 18.82 last year to 33.71 this year. So, I’m not claiming you are wrong at this price point. I think you were too cheap before. But I do feel I should have been warned about such a large price increase for what seems like the same product. It also seems like a bad business move to have such a large increase without notification. I was surprised when I saw the charge on my credit card.
Hello,
We announced it well in advance in 2023:
And also published it on LinkedIn, Twitter, Mastodon and BlueSky at the time.
Then we didn't actually do the increase in September 2024 as was planned, but did it in April 2025 (so you got about 8 extra months), and we announced it on LinkedIn, Twitter, Mastodon and BlueSky at the time. Here for example:
I can appreciate not everybody is on social media, I'm not either, but we definitely did our best to tell everyone, making two separate announcements and a total of nine different posts.
@laurent Just giving my 2 cents here. I’m not a Joplin Cloud user myself, but when I’m subscribing to a premium service of any kind, I would expect to be notified of payment increases within 3 months of the change and to be notified via email. I appreciate announcements were made in various places, but personally I think this could be done better for the following reasons:
- Even if anouncements had been made previously, I think changes should be repeated within 3 month of the change (ideally 1 month before the change) actually taking place in order to retain relevance. If something is announced 6 months in advance, it can be easy to be dismissed by a user to deal with later, and then they forget about it when the time comes. When a service is taking payment from a user, this may require forward planning / making changes to their budget, but that’s not something one would do many months in advance
- As you say, not all users use social media. Practically every online account is associated with an email address, so it should be the guaranteed way to get a message to a user. If an email ends up in the spam and the user didn’t see it, or the user didn’t check their emails for ages, you did everything you could and there would be no blame on your side. But I think if you’re expecting users to look for announcements themselves instead of announcements coming to them, it’s understandable that there could be complaints made for a change to the subscription cost
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Thank you for replying, and I’m very glad you did try to notify people. I much prefer being wrong than that you made the mistake. However, I tend to agree with @mrjo118 that an email is the standard, normal way to alert users. Honestly, when I switched to Joplin Cloud from Dropbox, I did it only to support Joplin. Dropbox was working perfectly, and I didn’t get any benefit. I was happy to donate $20/year this way. Now however, I am getting the benefit of being able to share notes via publish. But, if I didn’t frequently publish a note, I think I would have been upset.
To be honest whatever we do there will be complaints, we could send emails, reminders, plenty of them, and still that won't be enough.
But overall we had very few complaints for this, maybe 2 or 3, so I'm considering we didn't do too bad
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Unfortunately, I have to confirm that a personal message – usually by email – is the best way to inform customers about a price increase for a service. From a legal perspective, there is no way for a service provider to comply with regulations without sending a direct message to inform customers (at least in the EU). I am pleased to hear that you have not received many complaints and hope that this will continue to be the case next time. However, in order to complete Joplin's philosophy of transparency, security, reliability and trust, I believe that a compliant approach as described above would be necessary.
I would like to add that I have been a satisfied Joplin user for years and a product manager with a legal background for decades, which is why this issue really prompted me to comment. I am aware that Joplin is run more like a project than a company, so with the best of intentions for the project, I would simply ask you to reconsider the way you communicate about an increase next time. Nevertheless, Joplin is great😀
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Laurent,
Your pricing is still very reasonable. Beats the pants off the new 2026 pricing for Evernote which has gone through the roof!
The big thing that I miss going from Evernote to Joplin is the ability to see my entire database online in a web browser.
Often I go to a location away from home like a customer site and I want to access my entire online database and it's a lot easier to do that in Evernote. What I do now is simply make sure I publish the Key notes that I need published for that particular customer visit.
Off topic which I will post separately to be proper I'm still looking forward to a Android Web Clipper like the one that obsidian has. For now I use Firefox on android which supports the obsidian plugin on Android and then I import and then move the documents manually to Joplin. A bit of a pain but there is no browser plugin available for Joplin on Android.
Keep up the good work.
@Wimvan I suspected there would be some kind of legal requirement for such communication as soon as a service is being charged for, but don’t have the legal knowledge to comment on it. When you say as above (presumably referring to my post), would a compliant approach just require communication by direct message, or would it also require doing so in a timely manner with a min and/or max forewarning? I just pulled the 3 months figure out of the air, as that seemed a reasonable time period to remain relevant.
Usually this is regulated by the general terms you agreed to when you sign the contract and this is of course embedded in a European framework if you’re located in the EU, depending on the business you’re in. An information 30 days in advance combined with the rights to terminate your contract should be sufficient in most cases. Interesting detail: price increases are only okay, if the customer agrees or doesn’t oppose to it. A service providers cannot increase prices on its own decision.
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I’m not getting involved, as its such a good price that I would haggle the wrong way 
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Did you try from here? https://app.joplincloud.com/
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