Google Keep is free, it’s already on your phone, and for a shopping list it is genuinely hard to beat. People leave it for a narrow set of reasons, and they are always the same three: they wanted to attach a real file and couldn’t, they wanted a note the host couldn’t read and Keep has no such thing, or they got tired of unlocking a phone and opening an app to write down one sentence.
BrainSack is built around those three. It costs $4.99 a month, which is $4.99 more than Keep, so the rest of this page is about whether that trade is one you’d actually make - including the parts where Keep wins.
Google Keep details verified 20 August 2026. Prices change - check theirs before you decide.
The short answer
Side by side
| Google Keep | BrainSack | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $4.99/month, one plan, 10-day trial |
| Capture by text message | No | Your own number. Text it and the note lands, tagged. |
| File attachments | Images, drawings and audio only | Any file type - 10 per item, 10 MB each |
| Encrypted notes | None. Notes are readable in your Google account. | AES-GCM under a key of your own, wrapped in Azure Key Vault |
| Share with someone who has no account | No - collaborators need a Google account | Read-only link, expires after 24 hours |
| Mobile apps | Android and iOS | Web, plus texting |
| Search inside images | Yes, OCR across photos | No |
| Batch capture | One note at a time | Dump mode - a blank line between thoughts, each lands as its own note |
| Organising | Labels, colors, pin, archive, reminders | Tags, colors, pin, archive, board or list view |
| Formatting | Plain text | Plain text |
The case for switching
Every account gets a phone number. Text it and the message is on your board a second later. Hashtags in the message become tags on the card and are stripped out of the text, so a thought caught at a bus stop arrives filed rather than as a line you have to sort out later. There is no equivalent in Keep - the closest thing is asking Google Assistant to take a note, which needs the phone awake, the assistant listening and a quiet room.
Keep takes an image, a drawing or a voice memo. It does not take the builder’s quote as a PDF, the spreadsheet you were sent, or the .zip of photos. In BrainSack the quote, the floor plan and the note explaining what you thought of them are one card - up to ten files at 10 MB each, any type. They upload when you save rather than when you pick them, so a draft you abandon leaves nothing behind.
Keep has no encryption feature at all: a note in Keep is a note in your Google account, in a form Google can read. An encrypted note in BrainSack is sealed with AES-GCM under a key belonging to your account, and that key is itself wrapped by Azure Key Vault. The body is never included when the board loads or a search runs - it is decrypted only when you open that one note. Those notes also can’t be shared by link, which is the point rather than a limitation.
Migration
Getting out of Keep is straightforward: Google Takeout exports every note as HTML plus its attachments, and it usually arrives within the hour.
Getting in is the honest problem - BrainSack has no importer today. There is no "upload your Takeout archive" button, and pretending otherwise would waste your trial. In practice people don’t move the archive: they keep Keep open for the back catalogue and start capturing new things in BrainSack, which is the only migration that costs nothing. If you want the old notes across, it’s copy and paste.
The trial is 10 days and takes a card up front. Cancel inside it and you pay nothing. Cancel later and access stops at the end of the period you paid for - your board isn’t deleted, so coming back months later finds it intact.
FAQ
No. There is a 10-day trial that takes a card, and after that one plan at $4.99 a month. There is no free tier, which is a deliberate difference from Keep rather than an oversight - the whole app is behind the one price, including the texting number, the encrypted notes and the file storage.
Yes, and most people do at first. Nothing here touches your Google account. The usual pattern is Keep for the shopping list the family shares and BrainSack for everything that has a file, a secret or a "text it in from the car" attached to it.
Not today. Google Takeout will give you the export, but there is no importer on this end yet, so bringing the back catalogue across means copy and paste. Most people start with new capture instead and leave the old notes in Keep.
A Keep note is stored in a form Google can read. A BrainSack encrypted note is sealed with AES-GCM under a key belonging to your account, and that key is wrapped by Azure Key Vault. It is not included in a board load or a search result, and it is decrypted only when you open that specific note. It also cannot be shared by link, because the point of it is that there is no anonymous way to reach it.
Not yet. You register your mobile number in settings and get a number to text back, and that path works with US numbers today. Everything else in the app works from any browser, anywhere.
No. The site works on a phone, and the texting number covers the case an app is usually needed for - getting something out of your head while you are walking. If a native app is a requirement, Keep has one and this doesn’t.
Cancel inside the trial and you pay nothing. $4.99/month after that, one plan, everything in it.
