back to article Scribbling limits in free version of Evernote set to test users' patience

Evernote plans to slap restrictions on users of its free tier, and from early next month there will be a limit of 50 notes and one notebook per account. The limits will hit new and existing users of the free tier from December 4. However, the company noted that "any Free user who currently has more than fifty notes and one …

  1. David 132 Silver badge

    $130 per year?

    To use digital post-it notes?

    And that’s not even a one-off, it’s a subscription, because of course everyone is now greedy for sweet, sweet recurring revenue.

    They’re having a larf.

    Have never seen the point of evernote, and am now even less inclined to check it out.

    1. Mayday
      Stop

      Re: $130 per year?

      Indeed. I get why they're doing it, but I wouldn't actually mind buying something and then it's mine. That's it. I don't care that "everything is going that way" or the copycat "everyone else is doing it so we will too".

      Well guess what? I won't be doing it.

    2. Claverhouse

      Re: $130 per year?

      Yeah, but, if you don't use Evernote, you will miss out on their new exciting plans for next year.

      1. Robin

        Re: $130 per year?

        I'd imagine those exciting plans for next year include "simplifying" the tariffs (i.e. making it more expensive)

        1. Lon24

          Re: $130 per year?

          I plead guilty to spreading free Evernote to my clients and acquaintances of old. Then several years ago as they began to get restrictive - I moved to Simplenote. But then as my needs exceeded its functionality and I had a server I used DokuWiki as a dump for all that miscellaneous stuff one accumulates - howtos, changelogs, scans of documents etc. Now that info is available anywhere on any device. Never looked back.

          Thank you Evernote for starting me off digitising my notes and forcing me to sort it properly. Now I regard freemium products/services as tactical solutions not to get hooked on. Only genuine open source software is unlikely to extract money with menaces. A pity that. 20 years ago I paid for most of my software giving authors reward for their code. But one by one they sold out to corporations that saw their objective as screwing the customers base rather than delivering better value for money.

          1. Terry 6 Silver badge

            Re: $130 per year?

            Interestingly Macrium Free (back up imaging s/w) is stopping updates from January. Only the paid version will be continued. I'll probably just keep using it, as is.

            I've recommended it over the years. Can't now.

            It seems a bit spiteful since I doubt that the free tier users will convert to the paid version. That's £60 for the home edition, but only gives "minor updates for this version only" i.e. once they bring out a new version it's as dead as the free one. Or £37 a year after the first "Black Friday half price" year, which, to be fair, isn't that expensive as such.

    3. NeilPost

      Re: $130 per year?

      A serious larf….

      That’s way more than an annual family (6 user) M365 subscription - which gives you the full Microsoft Office - (inc *One Note*) , Teams, 1Tb One Drive and E-Mail for each of the 6 users..

      Evernote annual sub value approaching zero.

      Perhaps they need to flog the business to Amazon, and it can get added to my Prime membership?

    4. Jason Hindle Silver badge

      Re: $130 per year?

      Erm, yeah - recently discovered I'd been paying for it. Stems from a free Pro account, via a customer, a few years back. Now looking at migrating it elsewhere before the next annual payment.

    5. Pete Sdev

      Re: $130 per year?

      Arguably as the costs of providing the software, such as servers, are reoccurring, a subscription model makes sense.

      $130/year is obviously overpriced in this case.

  2. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    Joplin

    After the ongoing enshittification of Evernote began, I jumped ship for Joplin and have not looked back. It undoubtedly lacks some features of Evernote but none that I've missed, and I definitely don't miss being constantly nagged about using features that I don't care about.

    1. Mayday
      Joke

      Re: Joplin

      Good idea. Evernote will be wanting a Piece of my Heart next.

      1. EricB123 Silver badge

        Re: Joplin

        Yes, she is my favorite female vocalist.

    2. TFL

      Re: Joplin

      Joplin also allows you to self-host your data, rather than forcing you to allow someone else's grubby mitts on your non-encrypted data.

      Works great with Nextcloud!

  3. Terry 6 Silver badge

    No good to me

    My use case isn't massive, but I do need to share notes across a desktop, phone and laptop as a minimum. Not an unusual array of devices.

    So the Evernote free version became useless to me a while back.

    Currently just using Onenote. Which works well enough for me, as long as I keep the "store" version at bay.

    I'll look at those other programmes and see which platforms they're good for. I need something that will work across Windows, iOs and optionally 'nux

    1. Primus Secundus Tertius

      Re: No good to me

      I'm glad to see someone else besides me uses One Note. It is slightly less likely that MSFT will scrap it, as they are about to scrap Wordpad.

      1. nintendoeats

        Re: No good to me

        Today I Learned that Wordpad still exists (but I guess not for much longer).

      2. Terry 6 Silver badge
        Unhappy

        Re: No good to me

        Yeah, but they are trying to move it into the shitty "Store" version only

  4. Jamesit

    "We recognize that these changes may lead you to reconsider your relationship with Evernote,"

    I've never had a relationship with Evernote, if I had it would have ended when they changed their privacy policy and allowed them to scan notes for data mining.

    1. DougMac

      I already reconsidered my relationship with Evernote long ago, and they and I parted ways after the first few stumbles.

      How can they possibly have any users left to get that kind of coin from any longer?

  5. The Spider
    Facepalm

    No RPM option for Linux, again...

    Checking out the Obsidian mentioned in the article, yet again I note that they offer no native RPM package - but almost everything else possible.

    Do I really have to "alien" everything?

    1. ChoHag Silver badge

      Re: No RPM option for Linux, again...

      If you go back about 10 years you can s/RPM/DEB/ and keep the same problem.

      What's old is new again. Soon people will complain that there is no flat pack or docker image or whatever it's become this week.

      Where's the BSD port?

  6. ChoHag Silver badge

    > "This with the price hike is a lot to take in, personally I am leaving EN for Obsidian."

    You're not going to pay for my free stuff any more? Well I'll take all of those costs I impose on you and impose them on someone else! See if you like that!

  7. pre-pc

    As an existing user you do normally get an offer to keep your costs down - the headline figure for a personal account is ~£70 p.a. but I pay something like 29.99. Yes, alternatives are available but it works well for what it is, and is a good fit for my purposes. If they enforce the headline costs then I guess I will overcome my inertia and move...!

  8. Terry 6 Silver badge

    The whole "freemium" model seems pretty screwed up

    I struggle to understand how the companies price this.

    Even the more trustworthy ones seem to not understand about use cases and costs.

    Proton is a prime example. I use the free email and vpn. I'd happily pay a small amount for a slightly better version with email client support ( and maybe calender sharing and even a local VPN, which isn't even in the cheapest paid tier btw).

    But not around £50 a year for 10 mostly unneeded email addresses an unneeded extra 15Gb of storage, 24 unneeded calendars.

    In general, almost none of the paid for content in the majority of freemium offerings are of any use to me and I can't justify the costs. Especially when there are so many of them. I'd be paying hundreds of quid a year for almost no extra value.

    It feels very like the business model that would rather have ten thousand customers each giving £100 profit a year than half a million each averaging £10 profit a year.

    1. David 132 Silver badge

      Re: The whole "freemium" model seems pretty screwed up

      I have a Freecell game on my phone. It has annoying adverts; when I’m at home my Pihole blocks them, but not when I’m traveling (which is when I tend to play Freecell… killing time waiting for planes, etc.)

      The game offered me a chance to pay and remove the ads. Fair enough, I thought; I get enjoyment out of this, and it’d be perfect without the ads. $5-10? No problem.

      $6.99 per month. That’s how much they want to remove ads from a flipping Freecell game. Almost $90 per year.

      And so my copy of the game still has ads, which I ignore, and the makers get very little, if any, revenue from me.

  9. Jim-234

    I'm not sure who they think will pay their sky high fees

    I used to use Evernote back way long ago.

    But when they hiked the price to $59 per year, I was like, well Microsoft 365 family subscription is only $99 per year and works okay.

    Cancelled Evernote and never looked back.

    I can't imagine someone wanting to pay $129 or $159 a year for Evernote, that's just crazy money.

    At the rate everyone keeps jacking up fees, there might come a time when there is a big demand for FOSS that does most of the stuff, good enough, that can also be hosted from a desktop at home.

  10. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

    Its funny in the quest for profits, companies never consider killing the biggest tax on the company, their local parasites aka leadership.

  11. sabrinakaten

    limit of 50 notes

    Evernote has set a limit of 50 notes and one notebook per account for new and existing users of its free tier. This change was introduced in December 2023 2. If you are an existing Evernote Free user with more than fifty notes and one notebook, you will still be able to view, edit, export, share, and delete existing vegaprint notes and notebooks.

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