Call this a response to latest news if you will but I have today read the recent update from Evernote and I have a response that I would like to make to it. I know what you are thinking….”Get in line pal” but here are my thoughts on Evernote’s price hike and where to from here.
You can read the latest update here.
The gist of what is said in that post is that firstly, Evernote are increasing their prices. Significantly increasing their prices. And secondly, they have some feature updates coming soon, notably with regard to AI usage.
Evernote’s Price hike
I want to get something out of the way right at the outset. I have no issue with an app raising it’s prices, in fact I expect it. There are many good reasons for an app to increase it’s subscription cost, reasons that I would fully support. For example, as cost of living and cost of production and costs generally rise owing to inflation, it makes perfect sense that an app would raise its prices incrementally over time to cover this cost. Also, an app may choose to enter the market with a low price point in order to gain more users and more traction. This would naturally be followed by a price hike later down the line.
However, Evernote’s update cites the main reason for the price increase being the release of new features. It explains the last price rise was in 2016 and since then so many new features have been added to the app to justify this. Here is my problem, the subscription model is based on just this very idea. Waaay back when, until the mid 2010s, any software you bought, at least at the personal level, was bought as a standalone piece of software. Every year or so a new version would be released, with more features, fewer bugs and better performance. Consumers could then choose whether to upgrade and purchase the new version, again at a standalone cost. If you chose not to, you could continue to use the version that you had with all the features intact. I suspect many did the same as me and upgraded every other version. Then, the subscription model comes in. Now users pay a monthly or annual fee. This comes in really with the advent of faster wireless broadband internet as products can be downloaded and installed at speeds not known before. It also meant the advent of data being stored in the cloud. So the idea being that the subscription covers the cost of using the cloud based aspects of the apps, such as syncing and cloud storage and covers the cost of the apps support and development.
This model has advantages and disadvantages. I will not elaborate here. The point is that Evernote’s argument does not really stack up. App development is part of the subscription cost of the app. This is why the fee is recurring for users. Assuming Evernote’s statement of the cost being the same since 2016, then at ~£70 per year for an Evernote Personal Subscription, that is close to £500 that personal users have paid Evernote for their subscription over the 7 years since the last increase. Under the old model outlined above, if you purchased a stand alone Evernote in 2016 and then wanted to spend £500 on a new version today, you would expect a significant amount of development to have happened to improve the app in the meantime.
Evernote’s ‘new’ features
But this is just one issue that I have. What I am struggling to fathom is that the nature of the apps development in that time has not really been that significant, at least not in terms of the advancement of its features. Between 2016 and October 2020, there was very little change in Evernote’s feature set and nature of development across different operating systems was inconsistent. This was a problem. Ian Small did some fantastic work at sorting all this and effectively re-writing and re-building the app to make it possible to release new features across all versions. This took a significant amount of time. Since early, 2021, two years ago, there have been some jumps forward in terms of features. I accept this. These new features do not set Evernote apart from other apps though. Reading the list of new features that they cite to justify their price increase, Advanced format editing and templates is something that is pretty standard across many note taking apps. Evernote’s toolkit here is still behind many of the apps available. Reminders, tasks, backlinks etc again are a fairly standard feature of many note taking apps. Some have argued convincingly that some of the features Evernote have added here are not really adding value if you want to use Evernote for taking notes. The other new features listed in the box, again these are all replicated in competing apps.
Whilst it would not be true to say that every feature Evernote lists is replicated across the board in every other notes app, it is true that you can get all the features they list in apps that come in at a fraction of the cost. Notion, for all it’s foibles and issues, can do a great job as a note taking app without costing you anything. UpNote, my app of choice, has a lifetime subscription coming in at £24.99 at the time of writing. That is £100 lest for life, than Evernote would cost you every single year on repeat.
I really like Evernote. I think it is a fantastic application. My first subscription on the old Plus Plan came in at £29.99 for the year. Since they ditched the plus plan I have been paying £45 per year. I have not read anything that justifies a price increase to £125 per year. I am sorry Evernote, but you haven’t explained this to me yet.
My last word on this is the lack of transparency here. There have been rumours around this price increase for some time. Many people report receiving emails about this just before their renewal. Yet all the public official channels have been silent. I do not like this personally. I contacted Evernote a couple of weeks ago to ask about this. I have it in writing that when my subscription renews, the price will remain the same:
“I wanted to be sure to let you know that your account does not have any scheduled price change. You may check your Billing page under Billing History that your subscription renewal will remain the same”
Now, the eagle eyed among us will see that this is not as water tight as I would like it to be. The update states that the new price will affect existing users renewal price after the end of May 2023. I have contacted Evernote to ask about this and will post an update to this article when the response comes in.
All of this, satisfies me all the more that my decision to use UpNote as the Hub of my second brain is a good one. If you would like to do the same then please check this video out to see how to transfer your data from Evernote to UpNote. If you want to consider Notesnook instead, then watch this space as a fellow creator is working on a series of videos about Notesnook and I am looking forward to sharing these with you as well.
You can read some articles I have published about UpNote below:
