A job search generates documents for months and then has to be readable years later, usually at the worst possible moment. That makes it a bad fit for a service that can change its terms, its price, or its mind. Keeping the whole search in plain files in a folder you control costs nothing and removes the question entirely.
This is the argument behind how Rejectory stores things, so read it as a position rather than as neutral reporting. The reasoning stands on its own either way.
An Awkward Shape
It is bursty. You apply intensely for six weeks, stop for eight months, then start again when something changes. It spans years, because the resume that gets you a job is the natural starting point for the next search two or three years later. And it is small, a few hundred files at most, measured in megabytes.
Now consider what that shape does to a subscription product. You pay through the eight months of not looking, or you cancel and hope the export still works when you return. Neither is good, and neither has anything to do with whether the software is any good.
What Does Lock-In Cost?
Lock-in is rarely dramatic. It is usually just friction arriving at the moment you have least patience for it.
The service shuts down, or is acquired and sunset. The free tier tightens and the thing you were doing is now paid. The export produces a CSV that loses your documents, or a proprietary archive nothing else opens. You changed email addresses and cannot get into the account.
None of these are hypothetical, and all of them are worse when what you have lost is a record of who you talked to and what you sent them.
The failure you should design for is not losing the app. It is needing the data in three years, when the app is gone.
Files as the Database
The alternative is boring and old. Keep the data as ordinary files, in a folder, on storage you already control.
In Rejectory's case that means each application is a JSON file and each document is a PDF, arranged in folders named after the employer. There is no server holding a copy, because there is no server. The app reads and writes the folder, and that folder is on your disk or in your own Google Drive.
The properties that follow are what matter:
It opens without us. JSON is readable in any text editor. A PDF is a PDF. If Rejectory disappears tomorrow, nothing you made becomes inaccessible.
Backup is already solved. The folder sits inside whatever you already use, whether that is Time Machine, Drive's own versioning, or a copy on an external disk. You do not need our backup feature, because you did not need us to have one.
There is nothing to cancel. No account, no subscription, no data to request the deletion of. Leaving means closing the tab.
You can read it in twenty years. Plain text and PDF are about as close to a permanent format as computing offers.
The Honest Trade-Offs
This design costs things, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Syncing across devices is your job. If you want the same data on a laptop and a phone, you put the folder in Drive and let Drive sync it. That works, but it is a step, and conflicts are handled by your storage rather than by clever merging.
There is no collaboration. No sharing a pipeline with a coach or a friend, because there is no server to mediate it.
Browser support is uneven. Writing directly to a local folder needs the File System Access API, which today means desktop Chrome and Edge. Everyone else uses Drive, or imports and exports a zip.
And you can lose it. Delete the folder and it is gone, the same as any file. There is no support address that can restore your account, because there is no account.
Those are real costs. They buy a property that is hard to get any other way, the guarantee that the thing you built cannot be taken away by a business decision.
What Does It Look Like?
Practically, it means the record of your search accumulates somewhere you can see. Every application, the resume version you actually sent, the cover letter, the stage it reached and when it last moved.
That record is what makes the rest of the advice on this site possible. Tailoring is editing when your profile and past versions are at hand, and archaeology when they are not. Noticing that four applications have been silent for three weeks requires having written down when you sent them. Following up usefully requires knowing what you said.
None of that needs a cloud service. It needs a folder, a consistent structure, and something that writes to it without getting in the way.
The General Version
The specific claim is about job searches. The general one is a rule of thumb worth applying more widely.
For anything you will still need after the tool that made it stops existing, prefer formats and locations you control. Use the fancy application for what it is good at, and make sure what comes out the other side is a plain file in a place you own.
That is not nostalgia for the desktop. It is just noticing which decisions are cheap to make now and expensive to reverse later.
If the folder idea sounds appealing, Rejectory is free and asks for no account. And if you want the tactical side instead, start with how applicant tracking systems read your resume.
