Evernote significantly increases prices – has the product improved?
I have been an Evernote user since February 2009, and I believe I found it extremely valuable and useful that I have dutifully paid $45/year for probably that long. Sara practically lives in the application on her Mac, iPad and iPhone. As of this writing, I have 18,198 notes.
Today they have announced changes to their pricing plans. For what I’m using, it would be $69.99/year, which is nearly a 56% markup!
I’m going to continue paying, but I fear many will be thinking about alternatives. The real discussions are at the forum which I encourage you to read. There are more alternatives these days — Microsoft’s OneNote (has an importer), Apple Notes is getting better, and so on.
There are still deficiencies with Evernote. Try exporting your scanned business cards as a CSV? Try two people editing the same document – you’ll notice locking. We’ve seen premium users go from “unlimited” to 10GB storage per month (not that I use all of that space). They’ve killed apps like Hello, Food. They’ve arguably made Skitch worse. They’ve once even lost data from Sara’s iPad – drawings from Penultimate disappeared. There was no resolution beyond the PNGs and JPGs I managed to extract.
If you ended up purchasing merchandise, like the Fujitsu iX500 ScanSnap Evernote edition or a Moleskine Evernote Smart Notebook you would have received points in your Evernote account. 10 points buys you a month, 120 points buys you a year – its unclear if this will change (it probably will), but I just spent 160 points to extend my Evernote account.
Phil Libin once talked about how Evernote would be a 100-year old startup. He also talked about how you turn loyal users into paid customers. He’s a big fan of Stewart Brand’s book, The Clock of the Long Now. Alas, he’s now a VC and there’s a hired CEO at the helm. Maybe we’ll get a Steve Jobs/Apple return moment at some stage. Till then, here’s to Evernote’s longevity.
