So I recently showed you a cool little app that displays short notes & reminders in the menubar. Today we check out a new app that’s just the opposite, a more complete, elegant and full-featured Notes app that offers plenty of reasons to upgrade from Apple’s built-in Notes app.

For starters, Agenda is a date-focused note taking app for both planning and documenting your projects. This is not a “grocery list” type of notes app. As the name implies, this app is more for project or meeting-based note taking. If you don’t know what that means, check out the site. If you still don’t know, then the app probably isn’t for you.

Agenda offers some pretty nice styling options, and allows you to convert your notes to Markdown or even HTML. You can share notes and projects created in Agenda with other users, or export as PDF, RTF, etc. Because Agenda is synced via iCloud, your notes appear on all your devices immediately upon entering them.

The non-subscription subscription

To me, the most interesting aspect of Agenda is the way the developer chose to price the app to make money. The app itself is free, and isn’t limited in any way. There are premium features you can permanently unlock all at once with an in-app purchase. Once you unlock the features, they’re unlocked forever. Plus you receive any new premium features the developers add in the next year for free. Again, those features stay unlocked forever.

At this point, you’re done paying for Agenda. Over time the developer will add new features, but you aren’t required to pay for them until such time that you feel it’s worth paying for. At that point, you’re receive all the premium features made available since your original purchase.

If that doesn’t make sense, check out the blog post explaining business model in detail.

In case you’re wondering, the iOS app works exactly the same way, and once you purchase premium features for one platform, you get them on both. So your Mac and iOS versions of Agenda will be identical with one purchase.

Agenda is free to use out of the box, and requires macOS 10.12 and/or iOS11 or higher. Premium features are available as an in-app purchase.