The Enshittification Timeline
Apps rot in an order: first the account, then a smaller plan, then a narrower way out, then an export deadline. Five dated examples, one check for each stage, a six-step audit you can run this week, and the same checklist pointed at our own menu, including the part we don't pass.
Cory Doctorow's January 2023 sentence described how platforms die. "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die." The American Dialect Society chose "enshittification" as its 2023 Word of the Year. The Macquarie Dictionary made the exact same choice for 2024, defining it as "the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking."
The complaint is a well rehearsed chorus. The useful part is the structure beneath it: the decay arrives in an order, and each stage leaves mechanical evidence you can check before the next one hits. The examples below span five different companies, and no single application is shown moving through all four stages. The order is a pattern of how power shifts, not a prophecy for every tool you own.
The database absorbs the file
A well-known password manager's own support page says its older versions "supported standalone vaults, which stored information locally on your device outside of a [...] account." The new major version, released for the Mac in 2022, "requires a [...] membership."
This stage comes first, because once your data sits behind an account, every later change can be applied to you from the other end without you installing anything. A company can't easily force a new restriction onto a file sitting quietly on your hard drive. They have to convince you to install an update. A database they control removes your veto. They change the rules on their server, and your software simply obeys.
The check is mechanical. Find your work as a file on your own disk, using your file browser, not inside the app. If you cannot find a file, what you have is a row in someone's database.
The plan limits drop
A long-running note-taking app published a blog post on 29 November 2023. It announced that from December 4, 2023, "new and existing Free users will have a maximum of fifty notes and one notebook per account." A different password manager ran a similar script on 16 February 2021. It declared that starting March 16, 2021, its free plan "will only include access on unlimited devices of one type", forcing users to pick between their computers and their mobile devices.
The note-taking app did leave an escape hatch. Its announcement noted that "any Free user who currently has more than fifty notes and one notebook will still be able to view, edit, export, share, and delete existing notes and notebooks." That exact distinction is why this is stage two and not stage three. The walls closed in, but you were not locked out of the things you already wrote.
Your defense mechanism is a screenshot. Save the plan page you are on today, with the date in the file name, because pricing pages don't keep a history for you. When the limits drop, your saved file proves what the deal was.
The exit gets narrower
A major ebook store sent a notice to its customers: "Starting February 26, 2025, the "Download & Transfer via USB" option will no longer be available." That option let people download a book they had bought to their computer. Sending books over Wi-Fi to the company's own e-readers and reading apps kept working, and books already on a device stayed readable.
What disappeared was a copy you could hold outside their system. The check is to export everything now and open the export in a different program. If the GDPR covers you, you have a legal crowbar. The GDPR grants a right to data portability. You have the right to receive personal data you provided "in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format", and to pass it to another company, where the processing is based on your consent or on a contract, and is carried out by automated means.
The window closes
A read-it-later service, in its owner's words, "has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading." The shutdown was announced on 22 May 2025. The service stopped working on July 8, 2025. From the announcement: "Users can export saves anytime until October 8, 2025, after which their data will be permanently deleted."
The company later pushed the export deadline back to November 6, 2025. At this final stage, the export is the entire relationship. Check your exposure by writing down the date of your last full export.
An audit you can run today
You can run this test on the tools sitting in your taskbar this week.
- Find the file on your disk using your file browser, rather than opening the app itself.
- Open it somewhere else to see if anything else reads it, and to check what is lost in translation.
- Save the plan page you are on today, with a dated file name.
- Export everything and open the export in another program to prove the exit is still functional.
- Date your last export, and put the next one in your calendar as a repeating reminder.
- Ask for it in a machine-readable format under Article 20, if the GDPR covers you and the data was provided under consent or a contract.
An app that fails the first two has already done stage one to you, whether or not it has done anything else.
What our files look like
The first check asks if you can find the file. DocCafe opens and saves .docx documents. SheetCafe opens and saves .xlsx, .xls and .csv files, and SlideCafe saves .pptx decks in place. The files stay on disk where you put them. NoteCafe keeps every note as a plain Markdown file in a folder you choose. PassBrew uses a .kdbx file for its database. You sync it however you like. Picacino reads the folders you already have with no import step. The folder is the source of truth, and its database is a cache you can delete and rebuild.
The second check asks if you can open it somewhere else. Other apps can open NoteCafe's notes at any time. The PassBrew .kdbx file stays compatible with other KeePass apps. DocCafe saves a copy as OpenDocument, RTF or plain text. Picacino writes corrections to a photo's metadata into the photo file itself, so every other program sees them.
TaskCafe is a kanban board app. Export writes a single .taskcafe file holding every board, card, checklist, comment and attached file, and Import reads it back. It passes "find the file". It does not clearly pass "open it somewhere else", because its listing names no other program that opens a .taskcafe file.
The deal printed on today's page
You do sign in, because getapps.cafe is a membership that licenses the software, meaning each computer you sign in on uses one licence slot, but your actual work does not move behind that boundary to get absorbed into a vendor database. The sign-in pays for the licence. It doesn't touch your documents. Stage one is about where your data lives, so stage one, as this post defines it, doesn't happen here.
Cancelling keeps your access until the end of the period you already paid for. When a membership ends, your files are still right there on your disk. They stayed exactly where you put them.
Stage two is the shrinking plan. That could apply to us like anyone. Today, the two plans get identical apps. The difference is how many computers can use them. That's the deal printed on today's page. You should save it with the other plan pages and hold us to it. SlideCafe is released under the AGPL-3.0 with its source code available to download from its page, but that is true of SlideCafe only.
The two checks are entirely in your hands. Open your file browser, find the file, and open it in a different program. You don't have to take our word for anything. Start the free trial at getapps.cafe/membership.