My 12,335 notes in Evernote just got their Moving Day notice.
I received an email from Bending Spoons yesterday that they are discontinuing their current plans and moving Evernote licensees to two new tiers: “Starter” and “Advanced.”
The pricing attached to those tiers makes the 2023 Evernote Pricing Increase discussion look quaint and a bit naive. According to the message:
The difference primarily comes down to how you use Evernote:
Evernote Advanced (USD 20.83/month, billed annually at USD 249.99, or USD 24.99/month, billed monthly) is ideal for power users who manage large amounts of content and complex workflows.
Evernote Starter (USD 8.25/month, billed annually at USD 99.00, or USD 14.99/month, billed monthly) is great for casual or occasional users, or anyone just beginning to build their second brain with Evernote.
While I store maybe 20 notes a month, I count on the entire database always being available. And unless something is not clear about their messaging, the “starter” plan allows for a total of 1 GB of storage over 1,000 notes and up to 20 notebooks.
The years of organizing, tagging, and ensuring it was easy to retrieve product manuals, household ephemera, medical information, and so on, requires the Advanced tier. And it makes no sense for me to pay $250 annually for that.
I’ve started researching where to lodge this information in a structured way. (So far, DevonThink and Apple Notes seem like the best candidates.) That will happen over these next three weeks.
Bending Spoons has immersed this tool in the ocean of AI, task and contact management, word processing, and a few other questionable extensions. They are welcome to do that. I suspect the AI backend expenses are eating them alive. I find the results of an AI search in my large database to be useless and irrelevant. Maybe they’re trying to develop Evernote as another “agentic” app.
I don’t know for sure, but I’m not sticking around to find out.
I had been on a grandfathered $75 plan for quite a few years, but it jumped to $140 in 2024. I reduced my data footprint substantially and switched to the free plan last year.
I’ve actually been impressed by how well Bending Spoons has supported Evernote since it purchased it, despite the AI “enhancements.” If I used it as extensively as I once did, or if I used it as part of a team that used it as a daily collaboration tool, a hundred-ish dollars a year doesn’t seem outrageous, but I just can’t justify it for mostly solo personal use.
I haven’t found anything that is as full-featured or that works as well in a multi-platform environment, but the free edition only allows the use of one device at a time. Given my drastically reduced usage, maybe it’s time I deleted my account entirely.
This is sad…but in keeping with Bending Spoon’s corporate strategy. It’s essentially a private equity firm that keeps a few developers on staff so that it can put all of its portfolio companies on a common back-end. It then cuts expenses as much as possible and tries to exploit user inertia or lock-in.
I agree that’s a big part of Bending Spoons’ overall approach to its acquisitions, but they’ve clearly devoted real attention to Evernote. I might not agree with everything they’ve done to the software, but my sense is that they have continued to develop Evernote competently. Well, at least as competently as anyone who claims to build “AI-powered” software.
I understand their CEO is an Evernote fan and heavy user of the product. I’m interested to see what they do with some of their other recent acquisitions, like Vimeo, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, and yes, even AOL. Eventbrite, in particular, can use a lot of improvement.
Yes, I agree on the support. They did essentially what Apple did when it threw out the entire Final Cut video editing framework and built a new application from scratch. Features that didn’t make it into the first release were reimplemented or reimagined later.
I used it constantly for its original purpose: taking notes and storing information. I was one of those people at conferences tapping away on my MB or iPad, capturing photos of slides, and so on. It was eminently useful for that, and it was easy to retrieve those notes later—even much later, based on anything I happened to know was in the note.
But. $250 per annum is a steep price to pay, especially because of my conviction that the $150 difference is going toward paying AI data credits.
It leaves me with that pipe dream of every nostalgic user: a version without AI, at a reasonable price. Of course it isn’t going to happen.
I abandoned Evernote a couple of years ago. After going through my notes, deleting some that were no longer useful or of interest, I moved the rest into Apple Notes. One thing I liked about EverNote originally was how many OS versions were supported. Once that changed substantially, and they added features that were of no interest to me whatsoever, I found it easy to cancel my subscription.
I too found Evernote’s latest price increase unpalatable and unacceptable. They’re doubling my price to let me keep what I already have: a large archive of notes and notebooks. They’re not even pretending that the “Advanced” tier actually has features not available on the “Starter” tiers—the email I got explicitly states that the only difference between tiers is (extremely) limited storage versus unlimited storage.
The only AI feature of Evernote I’ve ever used is audio transcription, and I have other options available for that—it’s not worth $250 a year just for that. So after a long relationship, I will also be parting ways with Evernote.
I did some searching around for alternatives. I’m going to try UpNote. It claims to have excellent import capabilities from Evernote, unlimited storage, and seamless cloud integration between macOS and iOS, with a magnitudes lower price.
I’ve tried Bear in the past, and while it’s also an extremely competent app, I found the formatting limitations of Markdown insufficient to my needs. (One key feature absent from Markdown is color, which I use extensively in certain notes to make different information quickly identifiable.) On the other hand, Bear is free. If Markdown formatting suits your needs, I’d recommend trying Bear.
Well they’ve removed Vimeo’s VOD option which is annoying for small producers. And introduced a streaming/host option for larger ones. Not sure how that’ll go. I was set to cancel my WeTransfer subscription and they offered a 50% discount so I have elected to stay. I agree using Eventbrite is terrible experience.
On screen, this looks like all of classic Evernote’s core features, with a refined interface for 2026.
I do worry about their optimism concerning storage and storage costs, but it sounds like a business decision that they believe they can sustain. I’ll give it a try and thanks for the tip!