You can use PaNotas with no account at all during the trial period — the data stays on the device and nothing is sent anywhere. The account comes in when you want the data to exist beyond the device: syncing, switching phones, sharing a category. After the trial, it becomes required to keep using the app.
The trial period
The trial lasts 30 days and is counted from when the app actually started being used — the first content created — not from the day you installed it. While it is running everything works: categories, entries, annotations, import, test mode.
After about ten days of use the app starts reminding you to create an account, with a notice that appears at most once a day. In the final stretch that reminder gets more frequent. When the period ends, a screen tells you the trial is over and offers sign-in, account creation or subscription.
Your data stays in the device's local database. Creating the account after the deadline unlocks the app with everything you already had — there is no reset.
Creating the account
Sign-up asks for your full name, email, a password (repeated for confirmation) and acceptance of the terms — without it the button won't go through. The email needs to be genuinely valid: it is where confirmation, password recovery and any sharing invitations arrive.
If the app has no categories yet, sign-up leads straight into the initial tree creation flow; if it already has them, it returns to the main screen with the account linked.
Signing in
- Email and password — the standard path. On signing in, the app stores the email and the session token on the device and checks whether it can already sync.
- Google — the app opens Google authentication in the browser and you bring back the code shown at the end, pasting it into the indicated field. Your Google password never goes through the app.
- Forgot password — enter the email on the sign-in screen and request recovery; the rest of the procedure happens through the emailed link.
What the account unlocks
| Feature | Needs an account? |
|---|---|
| Categories, entries, annotations, markers | No — they work offline, on the device. |
| File import and Test Mode | No. |
| Synchronization | Yes — plus the sync consent. |
| Shared category | Yes — account, consent and a valid usage authorization. |
| Use after the 30 days | Yes. |
Managing the account on the website
The client area on the website complements the app: that is where you confirm your email, give or withdraw the sync consent, change your password, edit your details and follow your subscription. Those changes travel inside the session token, so the app fetches them on its own from time to time; to bring them in right away, use Refresh session on the sign-out or the sync screen.
Subscription and payments
After the trial, going on using the app depends on a valid usage authorization. Buying it and changing the card happen in the client area on the website; the app has the Payment history screen, under Menu › Settings, which only appears for someone with an account.
It answers three questions, in this order:
- How long the app is released for. This is what counts in practice, and it is the date the app uses to decide whether to allow or block.
- How long it is paid for, and whether a charge is pending. When renewal is automatic, the end of the paid period and the end of access do not coincide: there are a few borrowed days for the charge to go through. Inside that window the screen says where it stands — sent and awaiting an answer, overdue, or refused. Those days are a courtesy, not a contracted term: the app does not say how many there are or which one you are on, and what it repeats in every warning is the only date worth acting on — the one access actually stops.
- What already happened: the subscriptions taken out and the charges, each with its date, amount, the period it covers and its status.
Everything else in the app works offline against the device's database. Not here: a payment made ten minutes ago somewhere else is exactly what people open this for, and a cached answer would be confidently wrong at the worst possible moment. So nothing is stored, the header says what time the answer arrived, and there is a button to ask again.
Where a charge gets sorted out depends on who is charging. A subscription paid by card is fixed in the customer area, on the website; a subscription taken out through the app store is only ever fixed inside that store, under your subscriptions there — neither the app nor the website can touch it. The app's warnings already point at the right place for each. Once that is sorted, use Refresh session so the app sees the new state without waiting.
A subscription set to renew on its own needs a conversation with the server for that renewal to reach this device. A device that has gone past that point without managing to talk to the server shows a "Confirming your renewal" screen instead of saying access has ended — because nothing was refused, the app simply has not been able to ask. Get online and open the app again; your data is still here.
Signing out
Signing out erases nothing by itself — but the sign-out screen is where the choices about your data live, because that is the moment they make sense. Two switches, answered before the button unlocks, and the button's label says what the combination will do:
| Switch | What it does |
|---|---|
| Erase the data on this device | Clears the local database. It comes already on when everything has reached the server and this device has synced successfully at least once — in that situation there is a copy waiting for you at the next sign-in. The screen shows how many changes never went up, so the decision is made with the number in front of you. |
| Also erase my data on the server | Erases the copy held in the account, without closing it. It carries a second confirmation of its own, because it is the one choice on this screen that signing back in does not undo. It switches the one above on too: erasing on the server takes this device with it. |
With neither switch on, signing out only unlinks the account: local data stays, syncing stops.
The same screen has three other doors, which are not the exit:
- Download my data — a file export, through the system's save dialog. It works even without an account.
- Refresh the session without signing out — the most common reason people sign out and back in. Subscription, sync consent and account details travel inside the token; refreshing the session trades it for a new one carrying all of that, without asking for your password.
- Close the account — a different decision, with its own screen.
The erase reaches the server and this device. Another device of yours that is switched off or without internet keeps its copy until it connects. This holds for the data erase and for account deletion alike.
Deleting the account
Closing the account erases everything, on the server and on this device, with no way back. The screen asks you to switch on three confirmations before unlocking the button: that you are connected to the internet throughout, that all data will be erased on the server and on the device, and that the action is irreversible. Keep the screen open until it finishes.
Before that, it offers the lighter path: anyone who only wants to leave, or only wants to clear this device, settles it on the sign-out screen without closing the account. And if there is any chance of regret, download your data first.
A device that was still signed in finds out the first time it talks to the server, and lands on a screen that explains what happened and offers what can still be done with the data left here.