big news: Luminotes is now free!

Luminotes and Luminotes Desktop are now completely free. If you're an existing subscriber, you can continue to use Luminotes without any further charges. New users are also welcome to sign up. And as of today, everyone can download Luminotes Desktop without paying a dime.

So why the big change? Here's the skinny: Several U.S. state governments, including my own (Washington state), are in the process of enacting new sales tax laws that would require merchants to charge "destination-based" sales tax on online services like Luminotes subscriptions and downloads.

With these new laws in effect, any merchant would have to gather sales taxes for (and remit the proceeds to) potentially several different states, each of which has different rules for how taxes are charged. What's more, sales tax rates often vary on a sub-zip-code basis. So two customers living next door to one another could have different sales tax rates.
Needless to say, this would be a huge hassle to implement, especially considering that right now I don't even collect customers' postal addresses! So rather than taking the time to integrate sales taxes into Luminotes, I decided to simply stop charging for the service and downloads altogether. You won't have to pay any taxes, and I won't have to charge you for them.

As for the future of Luminotes, I plan to continue supporting the service and desktop version for the foreseeable future. I will post any and all updates here on the Luminotes blog.

If you have any questions or concerns whatsoever, please don't hesitate to let me know.
Enjoy!

Dan

P.S. I just put out a release today that, among other things, fixes several Luminotes bugs in Firefox version 3.5.

​Surprised

​Re: Surprised

Hi Oliver,

You are correct that there are solutions to deal with the tax issue. But personally I'd rather spend my time coding and improving Luminotes rather than collecting and paying ridiculously complex taxes!
Dan

​RE: Surprised

​Re Surprised

Dan, I've just discovered Luminotes. And "free" is my favourite price. Fascinating to hear of different sales taxes in USA where we in Australia have a nation-wide GST ! Anyway, well done! But you need money to eat, and if you don't eat we will be the losers. So, you must be able to make some money somehow from Luminotes :-). Cheers (How do I take the bold out of this note?)

​Re: Surprised

Welcome to Luminotes! And thanks for your concerns about my eating, but I'm doing just fine. :) I haven't completely ruled out "monetizing" Luminotes in the future, but for now, enjoy the price!

(To take bold out of a note, just highlight the bold text and click the B button on the toolbar. For your own non-discussion notebooks, there's also a "remove formatting" option under the "tools" button.)
Dan

​I love this program

This program got me the very moment I opened it.  Good work!

​Simply the best note-taking program!

Hi Dan,
After Google notebook, I was looking for various alternatives. There was one or the other problem - most of them would not allow me to insert images, for example.  Luminotes is simply what I needed. Being portable, I can keep my notes in sync too.
Thank you very much!