Evernote Price Increase + New Ai Features + Real Time Collaboration

Newsletter housekeeping: The first episode of the Triple 'T' Productivity Podcast went live the other day. I had the delight of talking Evernote with YouTuber & Evernote Expert Vlad Campos. Listen here.

Bending Spoons, the new(ish) owners of Evernote have broken their silence, put up the prices and given us a glimpse of what to expect over the next few months.

Read the full release here.

Stand by for an issue full of shock and awe! It's a long one.

Price increases

No one smiles when the price goes up and if I'm honest I'm slightly surprised by the amount it's gone up. It's not a massive hike but I wouldn't call it small.

Lets get a few things out of the way before we talk about money.

The plans stay the same. The free plan is going nowhere. The Personal and Professional Plans stay the same but we get new features, more on that later.

I was expecting the price to go up. Everything has gone up! If you subscribed to Evernote before July 2021 then your price was set in 2016.

What I've done is list the new prices for GBP, USD and EUR but Evernote are still going to be charging in local currencies so you can see the prices for all countries here.

Personal Subscription Monthly

£8.99 / $14.99 / €12.99

Personal Subscription Annually

£79.99 / $129.99 / €99.99

Professional Subscription Monthly

£13.49 / $17.99 / €14.99

Professional Subscription Annually

£104.99 / $169.99 / €129.99

I pay monthly for the professional plan so I'm seeing an increase from £7.49 to £13.49. An increase of £6 a month. That's not tiny, it's not a lot. It's not as bad as I thought it might be, but it's still not small, it's around 80%. One thing it might do is push me to the annual subscription which is £104.99 or £8.74 a month.

Is it enough to put me off Evernote and go hunting for another app? No.

I can stretch to an extra £6 a month. I run my work and personal life from Evernote and have workflows and systems set up. I also use Evernote a LOT, it's open all day.

I also think that with the reduction in investor money in the tech sector and investors finally wanting to see a profit, a lot of cloud apps are going to increase in price. The model of investor subsidised pricing to rapidly grow users could be on the way out.

Evernote also needs to make a profit. It hasn't for a while and I think the restructuring that Bending Spoons has done will secure the future of Evernote.

The new prices start for new subscribers on May 1st 2023.

Any existing subscribers will start to get emails telling them the price will go up in a month, so If you usually pay on 14th June you'll get an email 30 days beforehand telling you about the increase.

Make sure your Evernote email address is valid.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see other productivity apps increase their prices over the next month or two.

Two questions to ask yourself when thinking about price:

Do I get enough 'value' out of Evernote to pay the price?

Would my workflows be more difficult without Evernote?

Let me know what you think of the price increase in the comments? Are you happy to pay up? Looking to leave?

Ai things coming to Evernote

So it's not all bad news. For a few extra pennies a month we're getting some fancy new things and some are really good.

The new Ai features will need a paid plan and will be opt-in so you don't have to use them. No Ai is going to be messing with your notes without permission.

Ai Note Cleanup - should arrive around the middle of May(ish).

This is very nice. I saw it in action a few weeks ago during a demo. It works well.

The idea is that you can use Evernote what it was first designed for, a big knowledge and idea dump, then you press a clean-up button and the Ai will structure, format and tidy your note so it makes sense.

I like the idea of this and will be using it a lot. Once the feature goes live I'll write something up about it with some demos.

Ai Search - arriving later in the year

This is freakishly good. Imagine typing "Find me all my expense notes from April 2020 to March 2021" or "Show me all the designs tagged home that include an image".

Evernote search is already very good but this will make search more personal and relevant because you can use the words that you want to use.

I'm going to predict that this feature alone will be a total game-changer for a lot of folks. We'll be able to call up archive notes instantly and then export them as a PDF or share them with someone.

I'm really looking forward to having a play with this when it comes out.

About the Ai

I quite like the Bending Spoons approach to Ai. They don't want to introduce easy, flashy integrations, but something that actually helps people. One issue I have about Ai is that a lot of apps are making easy things easy instead of making really hard things easy.

On the privacy side your notes won't be used to train the Ai model. Evernote has told me that they're using the OpenAi API which, in their own privacy notes, say that data transferred via the API doesn't get used to train the model unless explicitly told to. Evernote does not share data to train the Ai model. This is important for me.

Real time collaboration

This is another game-changer.

Sharing notes with others has always been a PITA. Notes are locked if someone else is editing and to be honest the sharing system in Evernote needs a bit of an overhaul.

Real Time Collaboration is going to be huge. You can have more than one person in a note at the same time editing the same note.

I've seen this working but not had a chance to have a go yet. It works really well so if you share notes with your partner or work colleagues you're going to be able to collaborate properly.

Better more reliable sync

I've had the pleasure over the last couple of months to sit in meetings with the Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari and the Evernote product lead Federico Simionato and apart from being very nice folk they have ALWAYS talked about improving Evernote sync and the reliability of the app.

Every time I've seen them speak they've said they have folks working all day on making sync bullet-proof, increasing the speed of all the apps and making things much more stable.

The backend sync has been a work in progress for a long time and Bending Spoons seem to of pushed this work forward very quickly. I've seen improvements in app speed over the last month and the Android app is like a different beast compared to a couple of months ago.

The initial improvements in sync should arrive to everyone from the start of May and then more improvements will be made over the next couple of months.

For those who've had trouble with duplicate notes, long sync times and mobile sync, this should be very well-received.

I'm looking forward to all-round performance improvements.

Final word

Sorry this has been long. There's been a lot to talk about.

Let me know your thoughts about pricing and Ai in the comments and don't forget to catch up with episode one of the podcast.