Evernote Pushes Users To Upgrade (techcrunch.com) 33
After making steep cuts to personnel earlier this year, Evernote's Milan-based owner Bending Spoons is now experimenting with a new plan that would push more users to upgrade to paid versions of its service. From a report: The company confirmed to TechCrunch it's been running a small test that placed limits on the number of notes free users could create, but said the new plan is not yet finalized. TechCrunch was alerted to the test by an Evernote user who logged in to a pop-up message that informed them that unless they upgraded to a paid plan, they would now be limited to only 1 notebook and 50 notes. That change would dramatically limit the service for longtime Evernote users who have accumulated hundreds or thousands of notes over the years.
Way too late. (Score:4, Insightful)
I've migrated everything to Joplin.
Eat my dust, Evernote, after over a decade. What did you think would happen after you fired everybody who knew anything about the app?
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Same here, other than I moved to Apple's note program, although if I do move away from the Apple ecosystem, then Joplin is the best thing going.
EverNote had a good thing going, but they didn't support encryption (setting passwords on docs is not E2EE), and their prices were way too expensive for what they offered. Why pay for a subscription when OneNote, Apple Notes, or even Notepad++ is free? If they had something to offer that was worth the cost, but even then, they were expensive.
Re:Way too late. (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, I paid for a subscription - for a very long time indeed. I'd say 20 years if I could verify, but at least 10.
But they kept jacking the price and reducing features for the middle tier, which was sucky enough, but when they wiped out the development team, I couldn't expect anything else promising, and expected a certain amount of flopping around and data loss.
Joplin is an all-platform solution, which is one thing I needed, and I don't use (and have tried and don't like) iOS, though Macs are both my daily drivers and work machines. (Apple's off my Christmas Card list due to the continuing degradation of mac OS). I use Linux as well, all over the house and the web, and ChromeOS when traveling light, and Windows when I have no alternative.
Wish I could stick to Linux exclusively, but there are a couple of killer app categories that just won't go there, Photoshop being one of 'em. Wish I could get Serif to get off their asses and port Affinity to Linux.
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Re: Way too late. (Score:2)
Well. I made sure with both Evernote and Joplin that there was a full migration-off path, and take weekly local backups, so I can jump when I need.
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I migrated off Evernote years ago. I don't recall what I used immediately afterward, but nowadays I'm self-hosting Nextcloud. There's an optional notes app accessible from the web interface and from Android devices (and possibly others, though those are all I care about).
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What did you think would happen after you fired everybody who knew anything about the app?
The same thing every single Private Equity thinks when they do the exact same thing:
a) Profit by cutting costs to the bare minimum. R&D by senior developers is expensive. A micro team of juniors from a 3rd world country that fixes bugs, if that much, is cheap.
c) Profit by continuously rising prices, squeezing current customers dry. Make sure to raise at a faster rate than customers leave the service, resulting in a net positive increase over a few to several years, depending on how dependent customers a
Irrelevant. (Score:2)
I was a paid user back in the day. Great thick client on windows, shared documents with my iPad with virtually identical rendering. Great templates for meetings. I used it constantly.
Then came a redesign so poorly executed I abandoned ship. Moved to OneNote and never looked back.
"How to Destroy your Relationship in One Major Revision: the Evernote Story"
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So happy (Score:2)
To be a Samsung's Note user.
Same will happen as usual (Score:5, Insightful)
The bait-and-switch system only works if switching by your victim, in turn, is more costly than just swallow the turd sandwich and cough up the dough.
9 out of 10 times, though, what you're dealing with is people who just used your product over any other product for two simple reasons: It was free and did what they wanted to do. So if it stops doing what they want to do or they have to pay for it, what they do is simply yell "NEXT" and move on to the next product that offers what they want to do for free.
For the time 'til the next switch is pulled. And then it's time for the next NEXT.
What this move will very likely produce is a lot of "Where should I go from Evernote?" and "Are there any products like Evernote?" on Reddit and similar boards, soon to be answered and people will move on.
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I went through that with Link. I bought overpriced electronics in exchange for lifetime service to control lights. Will I am thought that he could could change the deal but didn't realise that these switches can be operated manually. I'm sure that I coule even rig up anold Raspberry Pi to do it as well. It's funnyhow little a product is worth when someone tries to monetise it.
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Monetizing something isn't the problem, people are willing to pay for comfort. The thing is that there is a breaking point when someone who has the skill decides to reverse the crap out of it and once that happens, your monetization goes down the drain.
It's the practical application of the archer's problem: You can pull back that string more and more to create more and more tension and have that arrow fly further and further, but if you overdo it, at some point the bow snaps and you're left with nothing.
Kinda sad (Score:3)
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No. I gave them money for years, then they kept raising the price unreasonably.
I'm now on Joplin, and host my own sync server, so I can sync across all my devices, and so can friends and family for their own notes - for free.
I mostly sync for the convenience... shopping lists, addresses, etc... even paying $37/year was a bit much, but then they tried to get $150/yr out of me for the same thing. Screw Evernote, and the redesign was insanely stupid, screwing up encryption and other stuff.
It started good and e
OwnCloud? (Score:2)
Anybody test this out as a viable self-hosted alternative?
https://marketplace.owncloud.com/apps/notes [owncloud.com]
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Seconded...it works like a champ for my purposes.
Why (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you give any money to a company that's circling the drain?
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Why would you give any money to a company that's circling the drain?
TO get enough time to migrate your notes to another app. Remember, TFS says:
"That change would dramatically limit the service for longtime Evernote users who have accumulated hundreds or thousands of notes over the years."
If you accumulated "thousands of notes in many notebooks" in the free plan, probably Evernote would like to get cash from you, or, failing that, will be happy to see you go, lowering the load on thewir servers and storage. IF you need time to migrate your "thousands of notes in many notebo
I already did upgrade... to Apple Notes. (Score:3)
Evernote lost my business a few years back when they discontinued the native Mac and iOS apps in favor of a half-assed web "app" wrapped in an Electron shell... It is now gutted, with a number of features I used removed. Syncing is flakey at best. And overall performance is shite. It's a shame, because Evernote *used* to be hands-down the best at what they did, with no one else even coming close. But they wanted everyone to eat a massive downgrade in features and performance without a correspondingly massive cur in the pricing? Yeah... no.
Apple Notes is still not where Evernote when it was a native app. But it's MASSIVELY better than that trash Electron app. Sorry Evernote, but you blew it long before this current change. Buh bye.
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Does Apple track app deletions? (Score:2)
Because I'd think about paying money to watch that. I wouldn't pay for it but it's fun to think about.
Expensive now (Score:2)
I used to use Evernote and paid the basic subscriber fee - which wasn't onerous. Earlier this year they raised the rates -- in a big way. My answer was to export everything and delete my Evernote account. To me it wasn't worth the new cost.
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Surprised Evernote still exists (Score:1)
Left Evernote Years ago (Score:2)
I used evernote for a while... but it turned into a turd sandwich. I left them years ago.
Newsflash: selling digital Post-It notes (Score:2)
unlikely to be a wildly successful business model.
Obsidian (Score:3)
I recently discovered Obsidian. It made me very upset and sad that I did not know about this app sooner.
Evernote and OneNote are hot garbage in comparison.
https://obsidian.md/ [obsidian.md]
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I was scanning the comments to see if anyone had mentioned it.
I've started using it about a month ago, and I'm impressed. Simple Markdown files that you can sync between systems. (I use iCloud, but anything works.)
I still need to export my Evernote notes to Obsidian, guess I should not wait too long.
You won’t be able to get back to this offer (Score:2)
Why would I pay for something offering me nothing extra besides getting rid of all these annoying pop up messages?