After an earlier test, all Evernote free users now have their accounts limited to a single notebook containing just 50 notes.
While the company claims that most free users won’t be affected, that is almost certainly counting anyone who briefly trialled it before abandoning it. Almost no active users will fall within the new limits, effectively ending the free tier. The change will likely drive many to switch to Apple’s Notes …
Evernote has now updated a blog post to say that the change applies to all free users.
From December 4, the Evernote Free experience is changing. Going forward, new and existing Free users will have a maximum of fifty notes and one notebook per account. These limits refer to the number of notes and notebooks a user can have in their account at one time: you can always delete unwanted content to remain below the threshold.
In keeping with Evernote’s 3 Laws of Data Protection, and to ensure that you retain full ownership of your data, any Free user who currently has more than fifty notes and one notebook will still be able to view, edit, export, share, and delete existing notes and notebooks.
Previously, free users didn’t get access to all the features offered to paying subscribers, but did get reasonably generous usage limits:
- 60MB monthly uploads
- 25MB maximum note size
- Up to three widgets
- Attach all supported file formats
Paid plans currently start at $10.83 per month.
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Wow, with Apple Notes, Notion, Bear Notes, OneNote, ZOHO Notebooks, Agenda and a bazillion others that cost a fraction of the price and obviously many free. I don’t see why Evernote wants to kill themselves with the pricing when they are obviously a $20-30/year app all day around. They can definitely get away with firing like half the people and cutting it down to essential developer teams and basic marketing etc they are famous enough. I think only cheap pricing could bring Evernote back from the dead.
But it’s probably too late for that, I switched from Evernote to Notability way back in 2014 or 2015 and after that to Notion and Apple Notes around 2019 and I think many others found a good and much cheaper home long ago!
The company has seemingly been in difficulties for many years now, laying off staff in 2015, 2018, 2022, and 2023. It lost no fewer than four senior execs and 15% of its workforce in 2018, when one insider said the company was in a death spiral.
Evernote has slashed the price of its Premium membership as a new report indicates the company is struggling financially and facing leadership departures. According to a new report from TechCrunch, Evernote has lost its CTO, CFO, CPO, and HR head in the last month […]
The report cites an anonymous source, however, who said that Evernote is in a “death spiral” due to flat user growth and a lack of enterprise adoption.
Things got worse after the app was sold to Milan-based Bending Spoons. Earlier this year, almost all Evernote staff were laid off, and the company ceased US operations altogether.
This move may be a desperate push to try to convert free users to paid ones, but seems every bit as likely to lead Evernote users to abandon the app altogether. Apple’s own Notes app has grown increasingly powerful over the past few years, with links between notes a key new feature in iOS 17 and macOS 14.
Image: Evernote
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