Springpad

The smart notebook that turned everything you saved into something useful, loved by five million people and unable to pay for itself

Shut down
19902026

Springpad was a free personal organiser from Boston company Spring Partners, launched in 2008. You saved notes, recipes, products, films and places to My Stuff, and the service automatically recognised what each thing was and attached useful extras such as prices, showtimes and alerts. It had apps for iPhone, iPad and Android, a web clipper, and about five million registered users when it shut down on 25 June 2014.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2008
  2. 2008 Launch
    Springpad opens

    A smart personal organiser in the browser.

  3. 2010
  4. 2010 Version
    iPhone, iPad and Android apps
  5. 2013
  6. 2013 pivot
    Redesign around public notebooks
  7. 2014
  8. 23 May 2014 Shutdown announced
    A month of notice

    Export tools and a migration path to Evernote.

  9. 25 June 2014 Shutdown
    Springpad closes

The site through time

Read the old front page here, in one piece, from our own capture: springpad.com, 1 March 2014 →

Browse springpad.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Spring Partners 2008–2014 Founded Jeff Janer and Jeff Chow, Boston

Key figures [edit]

MetricValueAs ofConfidence
Registered accounts ▲ 5 million May 2014 Reported Figure cited at shutdown

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Spring Partners could not find a business model or a buyer for the service. Springpad announced on 23 May 2014 that it would close on 25 June 2014, and built an export to JSON and HTML plus a direct migration into Evernote before the lights went out.

Our analysis: Springpad did more with a saved item than any of its rivals: clip a recipe and it extracted the ingredients, scan a barcode and it fetched prices, save a film and it pulled showtimes. That intelligence was also the bill. Every enriched item cost server work and data licences, the service was free, and the plan to earn referral fees from the products people saved never produced real revenue. Evernote, its plainer competitor, sold subscriptions and lived. Springpad had five million registered users, a good product and no way to charge for it, and when the funding ran out it did the one thing a dying service should do: it helped everyone leave with their data.

History [edit]

A notebook that did the homework

Springpad came out of Spring Partners, founded by Jeff Janer and Jeff Chow. Where a note in Evernote stayed the text you typed, an item in Springpad was understood. Save a recipe from a website with the clipper and it extracted the ingredients into a shopping list. Scan a barcode with the phone app and it recognised the product and started watching the price. Save a film and it offered showtimes; a restaurant, the address and reviews; a wine, tasting notes. Items were sorted automatically into notebooks by type, synced between the web app, iPhone, iPad and Android, and could be shared publicly, which the company leaned into with a 2013 redesign around followable public notebooks.

Five million users, no invoice

Everything Springpad added to your items cost the company something: lookups, licensed data, servers. The product was free and the plan, referral revenue when a user bought a product Springpad was tracking, never covered the bills. Evernote charged its keenest users a subscription and grew past it. On 23 May 2014 the company announced it would close, saying it had failed to find a sustainable business or an acquirer; the team was widely reported to be joining Google. Users had a month to export their stuff as JSON and read-only HTML or to push it into Evernote with a one-click migration tool the two companies built together. The service went dark on 25 June 2014.

The domain today

springpad.com no longer serves the product. The public notebooks are gone; only the Wayback Machine remembers what a smart saved item looked like.

Similar projects

AOL Dial-Up The modem noise stopped, AOL did not 1991–2025 MobileMe The Apple service Steve Jobs apologised for 2008–2012 CompuServe The internet before the internet 1979–2009 Amazon Drive Amazon's cloud locker, unlimited for $60 a year until it was not, closed at the end of 2023 in favour of Amazon Photos 2011–2023 Pocket Eighteen years of saved-for-later, gone before you read it 2007–2025 MSN TV WebTV: the internet on your television through a set-top box, bought by Microsoft in 1997, switched off in 2013 1996–2013

Sources [edit]

  1. Springpad Wikipedia 1 January 2024 [archived]
  2. This startup had over 5 million users and a great product. Then it folded Fast Company 1 July 2014 [archived]
  3. springpad.com in the Wayback Machine Internet Archive 1 June 2013

Last verified: 31 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).