My last six months at Evernote

ollien

Hug of death? Archives don't have it either

eimrine

This service should not cost more than 3 dollars a month, for example most of my previously Evernoted friends used to migrate to Telegram free storage. Maybe Telegram provides only mediafile storage with no advanced search - but the search algorythm among your text document should not be significantly costier than GNU Emacs in Org-mode. Stepan Pachikov is so great guy, I listened a lot of his talks. I am sad to live without his software, without screenshot editing software having red arrows of some specific form and without the search which worked really well. Good-bye yet another greedy corporation.

VCFundedGenYer

I remember using Evernote in the very early 2010s, pre acquistion, and before OneNote got really good/had a cloud sync service. Evernote was...fine, but the UX was very stilted. Text placement was very restrictive, and the spontaneous nature of taking notes was suppressed by it generally forcing you to type linearly as if it were a Word document. I used it for the ability to seamlessly sync between devices, but once OneNote 2013 hit, I dropped Evernote like a rock in a lake. It had no competitive drive in terms of functionality once MS wiped the floor with them.

torton

I left Evernote when it became increasingly bloated and clunky as a product (on iOS at the time), and as they started tightening the screws on the free plan. My current generic note-taker is SimpleNote. It is Multiplatform, it syncs, and it's free. It does 1/20th of what Evernote does but that didn't matter.

enjoyyourlife

Cached: https://yandexwebcache.net/yandbtm?fmode=inject&tm=178922753...

PunchTornado

I remember i switched from evernote to obsidian in a few hours

largbae

Tl;Dr switched to UpNote, pretty happy. I loved Evernote, it plus David Allen GTD changed my work life for the better. But the bloat kept bloating endlessly. I filled in Evernote's surveys, I offered to double my payment for an Evernote Classic with just the feature set of 2012 or so. No teams, no chat, definitely no AI. Just my notes on every device, searchable and silently synced.

pyrophane

> Lock-in is the game. Users will pay. Many companies under-price their product and suffer the consequences. Well, just yesterday the WSJ published an article [1] about bending spoons that include this detail: > Evernote, a note-taking app acquired in 2023, was among the holdings Bending Spoons profiled in its IPO prospectus. Evernote’s revenue was 30% higher in 2025 than in 2022, and during that time average revenue per monthly active user rose 150%. What the prospectus didn’t say: Those figures meant the number of users fell 48%. Revenue rose through price increases as the customer base shrank. So, a lot of users were not willing to pay. 1. https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/at-bending-spoons-the-...

simonw

Here's a copy I pasted into a Gist: https://gist.github.com/simonw/3c5a53c012448456729bcfb19b661...

harshalizee

I would have probably still kept paying for Evernote if they just split the application into Evernote Classic (w/o any of the Collab, texting, bloat) and another with all the bells and bloat. At the end, it was so bloated that there was a slight lag in the editor which made it infuriating to type on it. Switched and never looked back.

simonw

> The business could clearly be made profitable – Bending Spoons proved that in a few months. The problem was that Evernote had raised over $200M at a unicorn valuation and investors needed a billion-dollar exit. No amount of expense-cutting turns a $100M ARR note-taking app into a billion-dollar company. I expect the same is true of Airtable.

0gs

a great read, and sincerely no offense, but a) "dead"? i guess its horn got sawed off and now it is a plain old horse. b) i had forgotten evernote had notifications (it probably still does! i presume i turned them off around 2009 and the setting has stuck). i presume it's literally only feature release announcements and MAU-farming zero-party ads (aka feature existence proclamations), what else COULD it be?

janandonly

Very interesting tale. I’ve had to leave a tech job that simply pestered everyone until they left. It’s cheaper for them tat way but it sucked for all of uw.

skeledrew

I am very thankful to Evernote. In May/June 2016 they restricted their free tier to 1 device, which pushed me to migrate and in the process discover Emacs+org-mode, which I've been using since then along with syncthing. It was a game changer and liberated my notes so I can arbitrarily manipulate them in ways I couldn't have imagined doing with their app.

fuckinpuppers

They just sent out pricing updates and it’s nearly doubling the price I was paying before. Their lower tier limits my usage and is still 75% of what I’m paying now. It’s just accelerated my exit plan.