The best pay-once apps for notes and research

Three Mac apps in this category can still be bought outright rather than rented. DEVONthink 4 at $99, Curio 34 at $99.99 and BBEdit 16 at $59.99, all read on October 29, 2026. The top pick is DEVONthink Standard, because a document archive keeps earning its price for as long as you keep adding to it. The cheapest sensible pick is BBEdit, which falls back to a permanently usable free mode instead of switching off. No testing was carried out. Every price, limit and licence term below was read off the vendor's own pages on one date, and prices move.

Notes and research software has drifted almost entirely to monthly billing. These three have not, and each one publishes what the next upgrade will cost.

The three picks at a glance

All three are Mac-only, all three include one year of updates, and all three keep working after that year ends. The differences are in price, machines covered and what you get for free.

• DEVONthink 4 - best for a searchable archive. $99 Standard, $199 Pro, $499 Server. Two Macs. No free tier.
• Curio 34 - best for thinking on a canvas. $99.99 Standard, $119.99 Professional. Multiple Macs you own. Free mode with a five idea space cap.
• BBEdit 16 - best cheap pick. $59.99, upgrades $29.99 or $39.99. Permanent free mode. A published 30-day refund window.

How this list was graded

No software was tested for this guide. The grades come from pricing pages, editions tables, licence agreements and sales policies read on October 29, 2026.

Every number was taken from the page as rendered, not from a summary of it. That matters because a one-dollar error in a price makes an entire recommendation wrong.

Where a vendor's own page contradicts itself, both readings appear. DEVONthink's editions table lists Scripting and batch processing twice with different marks, and the page itself warns that it "does not claim to be complete".

Why pay-once still exists in this category

Notes and research apps hold data you expect to keep for decades. A subscription that lapses on software holding ten years of reading is a worse problem than a subscription that lapses on a video editor.

All three vendors have landed on the same answer: sell the version, include a year of updates, then let the customer choose whether to extend.

DEVONtechnologies states it most directly. Asked in its own FAQ whether the model is a subscription, the answer is "No", followed by "Your license is always yours and never expires".

That structure, and what it costs over a decade, is set out in our guide to how lifetime software deals actually work.

The number that decides most of these purchases

It is not the sticker price. It is the renewal price, because that is what you pay every year if you want to stay current.

DEVONthink Standard renews at $49, dropping to $44 if extended before the year is up. Multi-year extensions are $79 for two years and $104 for three.

Curio Standard renews at $69.99, or $59.99 coming straight from the previous version. BBEdit charges $29.99 to move up one major version, with no annual renewal at all.

So on a renew-every-year pattern, BBEdit is cheapest, DEVONthink is next and Curio is dearest. On a buy-once-and-sit-still pattern, the order barely matters because all three keep running.

Only one of the three gives you something for free, forever

BBEdit's Free Mode is the most generous arrangement in this set. The vendor promises the app keeps working after the evaluation "with no nag screens or unsolicited interruptions, for free, forever".

It also resets. Install a new major version in Free Mode and, per the product page, "You'll get a fresh 30-day evaluation period" before it returns to Free Mode.

Curio's free mode is narrower but still real: Standard features with projects capped at five idea spaces, and oversized projects opening read-only for viewing, exporting and printing.

DEVONthink offers no free tier. Instead its trial is the longest, at a minimum of 30 days or 150 hours of actual runtime, which does not expire while you are busy.

Count your Macs before you choose

This row changes the ranking for some households and nobody mentions it on a pricing page headline.

Curio's licence key allows installation on "multiple Macs you personally own or control", per its pricing FAQ. There is no seat count to buy up.

DEVONthink includes two seats, described as "valid for two Macs". A third is $49 on Standard and $99 on Pro or Server, and each extra seat also adds three months of updates.

BBEdit's store lists only an individual licence at $59.99, with multi-user pricing available by quote. For one person on one or two Macs it is the simplest of the three.

What the upper tiers add, and whether the step is fair

Two of the three sell editions, and the steps are nothing alike in size. One asks $20 more, the other asks $100 more.

Curio Professional at $119.99 adds a command line tool with a built-in MCP server, smart kanban and query-based collections, table and Markdown table formulas, synced figures and files, Mermaid diagrams and presentation mode.

DEVONthink Pro at $199 adds whole subsystems rather than conveniences: scanner integration with OCR, barcode scanning, PDF imprinting, email archiving, speech transcription, a download manager, concordance, graph view and custom metadata.

DEVONthink Server at $499 adds exactly two rows on top of Pro per the editions table: a web interface and granular access management. Treat that as a team purchase, not an upgrade.

BBEdit has no editions at all. One licence at $59.99 buys everything the vendor sells, which is the simplest pricing page of the three.

Two of the three now put AI features behind the upper tier

This is new enough that it changes which edition to buy, so it is worth reading before you pick a tier.

DEVONthink's editions table places generative AI integration, an interactive chat assistant, text summarisation, image generation and text transformation in Pro and Server only. Standard has none of them.

Curio Professional ships a CLI with an MCP server, and names ChatGPT Desktop, Codex, Claude Desktop and Claude Code as clients that can read and write project data directly.

Curio ties those perks to what it calls sustainers: "customers who either have an active subscription or are still within the one-year update period of their perpetual license". An unrenewed key keeps the app but loses the perk.

BBEdit's pages carry no AI feature claims at all. For some buyers in this category that is a selling point rather than a gap.

Only one of the three has a mobile app

If you read on an iPad, this row narrows the list to one product immediately.

DEVONthink To Go is included with Pro, which carries five mobile seats, and with Server, which carries 25. The seats stay valid "as long as the license is eligible for updates".

DEVONthink Standard includes no mobile seats. That is the strongest single argument for the $100 step up to Pro if you work away from a desk.

No iOS or iPadOS app was found for Curio or BBEdit on the pages read October 29, 2026. Curio does ship a free Mac menu bar capture app called Curiota.

All three publish the price of the next upgrade

This is the quiet reason to buy from any of the three rather than from a cheaper unknown vendor.

DEVONtechnologies lists the version 3 to version 4 upgrade at $49, $99 and $149 by edition, states it is independent of seat count, and confirms existing licence codes remain valid.

Zengobi lists Curio 34 renewals for Curio 33 owners at $59.99 Standard and $79.99 Professional, with higher prices for anyone two versions back.

Bare Bones charges $29.99 from version 15.x and $39.99 from 14.x or earlier. All three have therefore capped your future cost in public, which an unpublished upgrade price never does.

How each vendor takes the money

Payment plumbing sounds dull until an invoice has to clear a company purchasing process.

Bare Bones is the most accommodating. Its store runs on FastSpring and it also accepts cheques drawn on a US bank, US-dollar money orders, and purchase orders with NET 30 terms at its discretion.

Those purchase orders are limited to D&B-rated US businesses, US educational institutions and government agencies, submitted by email or post. Verbal purchase orders are refused.

Zengobi uses Paddle for direct sales and Apple for subscriptions. DEVONtechnologies sells from its own cart and warns to "Check the final price in the cart before you swipe your card", since VAT and sales tax are added there.

Refund terms are the weakest part of all three

Only Bare Bones publishes a window. Its sales policies ask buyers wanting a refund to contact sales "within 30 days of your purchase", adding that "All refunds are issued on a case-by-case basis".

DEVONtechnologies' licence agreement offers a refund only where the software fails to conform to warranty, at the vendor's option, with App Store purchases routed to Apple.

Zengobi outsources the question entirely. Its legal page states Paddle handles returns and refunds for direct sales, and Apple handles App Store sales.

The practical conclusion is to treat the trial as the refund. Our notes on reading a software deal before you pay list the clauses worth checking first.

Check your macOS version before you buy anything here

The three apps do not share a floor, and the gap is two macOS generations wide.

DEVONthink 4.4.2 requires macOS Ventura or later. BBEdit 16 requires macOS 14.0 or later. Curio 34 requires macOS 15 Sequoia, and the page states it runs through macOS 27 Golden Gate.

So a Mac on Sonoma can run current DEVONthink and current BBEdit, but not current Curio. Older releases of each remain available and stop receiving fixes.

Which one to buy if you are still undecided

Start with the question you are actually trying to answer, because these three barely overlap in function.

If the answer is "where did I read that", buy DEVONthink Standard. If it is "what does this project even look like", buy Curio Standard. If it is "I just want to edit text fast", install BBEdit and let it fall into Free Mode.

If you are weighing the first two against each other specifically, our DEVONthink against Curio comparison sets the licence terms side by side in a single table.

What pairs well with these

None of the three is a writing app, and that trips people up. A research store and a drafting tool are separate purchases.

For long manuscripts, Scrivener remains the pay-once standard. For distraction-free drafting, iA Writer is the cheaper fit.

For code rather than prose, Sublime Text competes directly with BBEdit on a similar version-based licence.

For tasks rather than notes, Things and OmniFocus are both covered in our pay-once productivity picks.

Two candidates were dropped because their prices could not be read

This list is three apps long rather than five, and the reason is worth stating rather than hiding.

Tinderbox from Eastgate Systems is a long-standing pay-once notes tool. No price appeared on its product page when read on October 29, 2026, and the buy page linked from it returned a 404.

EagleFiler from C-Command is a Mac document organiser in the same bracket. Its product page carried no price string when read on the same date.

Both may well be good software at fair prices. A price we cannot read is a price we will not print, so neither was ranked here.

What we could not verify

No support response time, ticket system or staffing level was published by any of the three vendors on the pages read October 29, 2026.

No independent user rating with a usable sample size was found. BBEdit's Mac App Store listing states it "hasn't received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview".

BBEdit's multi-user price is quote-only, so teams cannot budget from the public page. DEVONtechnologies publishes academic discounts but not the academic prices themselves on its pricing page.

Bottom line

DEVONthink Standard at $99 is the pick for a growing archive and the licence most likely to still matter in five years.

Curio Standard at $99.99 is the better licence on paper, covering every Mac you own and falling back to a working free mode.

BBEdit at $59.99 is the lowest-risk purchase on this page, because the downside of changing your mind is a free text editor rather than a wasted payment.

Try all three before paying anything, then check the price in the cart. For what owning these licences feels like a decade later, read what happens after you pay once and our pay-once picks for freelancers.

Best for a searchable archive: DEVONthink 4

DEVONthink Standard at $99 is the pick for anyone whose real problem is finding things again. It indexes documents, web pages and notes locally, with encrypted databases, sync and versioning included at the entry tier.

The licence covers two Macs and one year of updates. When the year ends the vendor states the app stays "fully functional" and that the licence "never expires".

Pro at $199 adds OCR, email archiving, transcription and the AI features. Server at $499 adds only a web interface and granular access management, which is a steep step for two table rows.

The trial is the longest here: "Minimum 30 days or 150 hours of pure runtime". Read the full DEVONthink review for the upgrade and extension prices, which are published in full.

Visit DEVONthink 4
We have no affiliate relationship with this vendor. Link goes to the official site.

Best for thinking on a canvas: Curio 34

Curio Standard at $99.99 is the pick when the problem is seeing the shape of a project rather than searching it. Each project holds idea spaces filled with text, images, files, mind maps, tables and kanban stacks.

Its licence terms are the most generous in this set. Zengobi states that a licence key allows installation on "multiple Macs you personally own or control", against two seats on DEVONthink.

There is also a real free tier. After a two-week trial with all Professional features on, Curio drops to free mode with Standard features and a five idea space cap.

The catch is the renewal price: $69.99 a year against a $60 yearly subscription by our arithmetic. The full Curio review works through when each door is cheaper.

Visit Curio 34
We have no affiliate relationship with this vendor. Link goes to the official site.

Best cheap pay-once pick: BBEdit 16

BBEdit 16 at $59.99 is the cheapest licence here and the one with the softest landing if you never pay again. After a 30-day evaluation it keeps working "with no nag screens or unsolicited interruptions, for free, forever".

It is a text editor rather than a database or a canvas, with grep, multi-file search and replace, code folding, FTP and SFTP, Git integration and AppleScript all named on the product page.

Upgrades are published and cheap: $29.99 from version 15.x and $39.99 from 14.x or earlier. Bare Bones is also the only vendor in this set with a stated refund window, at 30 days, issued case by case.

It requires macOS 14.0 or later and exists for macOS only. The full BBEdit review covers why twelve monthly subscription payments cost a cent less than owning it.

Visit BBEdit 16
We have no affiliate relationship with this vendor. Link goes to the official site.

How we chose

We did not run tests of our own. Grades come from pricing pages, editions tables, licence agreements and store policies read on October 29, 2026.

Every figure was taken from the rendered page itself rather than from a summary, because pricing summaries get prices wrong.

Four things decided the ranking. What the licence costs. How many Macs it covers. What happens when the included update year ends. And what the vendor publishes about refunds.

Subscriptions were allowed into the comparison only where the same app is also sold as a licence, so the two prices could be set against each other.

Where a vendor's own page contradicts itself, both readings are printed. Where a figure could not be read, the gap is named instead of guessed.

Frequently asked