Nodes is bought once. There is no subscription, no account, and nothing that expires - you pay for the app, and then it is the app you own.
There are two unlocks. Alexandria is the library: everything that holds, moves and shapes a collection of notes. Rosetta is the intelligence: the model that reads your library and works alongside you. Rosetta includes Alexandria, so it is one purchase, not two.
Alexandria
The library, uncapped and portable.
- Unlimited notes and tags, and the whole catalog of 24 fonts.
- Import & export - the Import and Export dialogs, whole folders at a time, and the portable
.nodesarchive. See import and export. - Library backup - a daily snapshot of everything, kept on this Mac, and a restore you can undo.
- Graph settings - the forces panel, the search field on the graph canvas, and the Simulate over time player that replays your library in the order you built it.
Rosetta
Everything above, and then the part that reads. Rosetta runs a model on your own Mac - Apple Intelligence on macOS 26, or one you download from within the app - and it works through your library in the background:
- Tag suggestions - it reads a note and offers where it belongs.
- Semantic search - the notes it has read, found by meaning.
- Descriptions - every note gets a line about itself.
- Reminders - it notices what a note asks of you.
Nothing is uploaded to make any of this work. See on-device AI for how it runs and how to pick a model.
The demo
The download is free, and what you get is not a crippled editor - it is the whole one. The app calls this the Demo, and you'll see that word on the Plan screen until you unlock something. Markdown, Flow, links, tabs, Light Windows, the graph, the timeline, full-text search, tags and your garden all work before you pay a thing. Two fonts rather than twenty-four, picked so that every script the app can set is still covered: the catalog buys typography, never the ability to write in your own alphabet.
What it holds is a demo's worth: 16 notes and 4 tags - and the sapling in that first window is drawn at exactly that size, so the three arches show you the difference rather than describing it. PDFs and images are notes too, so they share the sixteen, and putting a tag you already have on another note never counts against the four. It is enough library to find out whether you want a library.
One thing about that trial is worth saying plainly, because silence would mislead: until you unlock Alexandria, Nodes keeps no recovery points - no daily snapshots, nothing set aside before an import. Your notes are still ordinary .md, .pdf and image files in a folder you can open in Finder (where your files live), and dropping a single file into the window always works. But nothing is being kept for you yet.
Buying, restoring, and the step-up
Both unlocks live in the app, under Settings ▸ Plan. Purchases follow your Apple Account, so a second Mac signed into the same account already has them - and restore purchases, on that same screen, brings them back if anything ever goes missing.
If you take Alexandria first and want Rosetta later, you pay the difference rather than the full price twice: the step-up is $5.00, offered in Settings ▸ Plan once Alexandria is yours.
If you were here before
Everyone who used Nodes before the 2.0 release keeps everything, free, forever. That is not a promotion with an end date - the grant is worked out once and then written down, so an offline launch or a bad receipt can never take it back. You'll find You were here first on the Plan screen instead of an offer.