New Evernote Free Plan Restrictions. My Thoughts & What To Do Next?

Newsletter housekeeping: I totally missed the 1 year birthday of Taming The Trunk🎂 This Substack started on 14th October 2022 when I wrote a post grumbling about tags. Thank you to all the subscribers, I much appreciate you handing over your email address and I will continue to inform and entertain. Onwards march the herd!

Let the drama begin!

So, Evernote have just announced that their free plan is going to be restricted starting December 4th.

First up for the social media drama folk, no one is deleting, removing, hiding, burning or shredding any notes.

This is what the new plan will look like for new and existing free users.

• New maximum limit of ONE notebook

• New maximum limit of 50 notes

• Notes in the trash count towards the 50 note limit

• You can still view, edit, export, share and delete notes

• No change to the two device limit

• Device limit changed to one in August 2024

• You can still share notes to others

• You can still receive shared notes but only copy them to your account if you’re within the note limit.

• If you are on the free plan right now with over 50 notes then you can still view, edit, export, share and delete.

Even though this new free plan will always be available, I think we can really look at this as a free trial rather than a free forever plan.

Lets be honest, they want folk to pay to use their product.

The history of free

I’m ignoring open source software which is a different beast all together.

Free trials have been around in the software world forever. I remember buying software in the 90s that would work for 30 days and then something like the save button would become disabled. They wanted coin for their efforts.

The free forever plan is something that only really cropped up at the start of the Software As A Service (SAAS) or Cloud industry and Evernote was very much one of the early entries into this world around 2008ish.

Before 2008ish, we didn't need cloud software. I mean, the world worked, we got stuff done and everything moved along just fine without having all your data in the cloud.

In fact, pre 2008 was a boom time for western productivity. After 2010, productivity in general has slumped and not recovered. Is this something to do with smartphones and productivity apps?

So, we didn't need the cloud.

One way companies like Evernote, Dropbox and Google got us to put our data into their cloud systems was to make it free, forever.

If you’re old, you’ll remember getting an extra 500MB of storage from Dropbox for recommending new free users. On top of your free 2GB!

All of this free was subsidised by Venture Capital (VC) money.

The idea was to build your user base to tens or hundreds of millions of people and then find a way to monetise them.

Because its easy to monetise a business when you have those many users, right?

Not really. The free plans were so generous to get folk onboard in the first place, that the vast majority didn't need to pay. They had what they wanted for free. Why on earth would you part with coin?

This is when the free plans started to become more restrictive.

Dropbox Basic users are given two gigabytes of free storage space.[76] This can be expanded through referrals; users recommend the service to other people, and if those people start using the service, the user is awarded additional 500 megabytes of storage space. Dropbox Basic users can earn up to 16 gigabytes through the referral program. Wikipedia

Dropbox made a lot of changes, so did Google Drive. I think OneDrive started with 15 or 25GB of free storage and then changed it to 5GB.

Not enough folk signed up for the premium versions because the free versions were too good.

This has been Evernotes problem for almost 15 years. The free plan was always too good.

But I would subscribe if it was cheaper

Reading social media commentary over the last couple of days one phrase has stood out a lot. Free plan users have said they would pay if it was cheaper.

I don't believe this. Evernote over the last 15 years has been at almost every price point. You could buy it for around £40 a year back in 2016. Some folk managed to find deals at $35 a year.

In fact exactly one year ago you could buy Evernote for around $6 a month.

Even with these cheaper plans, large numbers of people obviously didn’t sign up. The free plan did everything they needed it to do.

In fact it got to the point that the Evernote investors sold the company to Bending Spoons and its now their job to make it profitable so it can pay its own bills.

Free on the internet is coming to an end

We no longer need to be persuaded to use cloud software.

We no longer need to be persuaded to have subscriptions.

This has become the norm.

In my consulting work I deal with a number of startup software companies and for a while now, none of them have offered free forever plans. Its always been a free trial and then you pay.

There’ll be many software companies watching Evernote very closely to see what happens. I can see a note taking app that starts with an ‘N’ changing its plans at some point soon. Right now they are very reliant on investor money and investors only care about the return.

Dealing with entitlement

I don’t mean entitlement in a negative way. I mean that software companies have made a rod for their own backs by offering so much for free for so long.

I talk to folk who think its utterly ridiculous to pay for email.

Some folk think all their phone apps should be free.

These people are not freeloaders, they’re not doing anything wrong, they are doing what the companies wanted, join for free. It was the companies’ fault that they couldn’t monetise the majority.

If you offer a lot for free for a long time people come to expect it and Evernote have been offering free for 15 years! There’s going to be a lot of unhappy people ranting on social media who expect to use the software for free and that’s not their fault, they have been told they can do this for a very long time.

My own opinion

My own personal opinion is that the new plan doesn’t go far enough but then I’m a grumpy old man😂

I don’t believe software companies are any different to any other company. They all have staff, owners, need to make profit. Why should they offer free.

You don't ask the local car dealer to give you a cheap model for free and tell them you’ll pay for a luxury model if you like it!

Software companies are just like every other company.

My own idea was to scrap the free plan, have a 30 day free trial and if you didn't login for 6 months delete the data😂

Be thankful I’m not running Evernote!

Honestly. I don’t think anyone should work or create anything for free. I certainly charge my clients!

Will Evernote survive this?

Hell yes. The drama and hyperbole will play out in the echo chambers of social media but the majority will boot up Evernote every day and get on with their lives.

This move won’t hurt Evernote much. Losing folk who don't pay you won’t hurt.

Signing up paid users and generating paid growth will always be an issue for Evernote and we’ll have to see how that goes. I think if Bending Spoons manage to turn Evernote into a very premium service then everything will work out fine, especially at the price point.

One thing I remind myself of, is that I hear from new subscribers all the time. I had a lovely email the other day from a new Evernote Professional Plan user who said they were looking forward to learning how to use the app and thanked me for the articles.

Away from the social media drama, life just carries on.

What to do next?

Realistically there are three choices:

• Work within the new restrictions

• Pay for a plan

• Move to another app

If you decide to pay then go all in. Stop looking at other apps, start creating your own workflow and get every single pennies worth of use out of the plan you buy.

Evernote is an amazing tool. Nothing out there combines all its features in a way that helps us remember everything.

Some positives to think about:

• The app is MUCH better than 12 months ago

• Ai Powered Search is useful for quickly finding answers. I use it.

• Real Time Editing works well, especially if you use it on multiple devices. It saves me time when I swap between my desktop & studio PCs.

• The home screen widgets help you create your own little dashboard, especially when you use multiple filtered note widgets

There’s a great post on the Evernote forum by Gazumped where he asked ChatGPT to come up with some uses for Evernote:

• Recipe Collection: Save favourites 

• Learning Notes: a new language or studying a new topic.

• Book Summaries: to remember key points.

• Travel Plans: travel itinerary, places to visit, restaurants to try...

• Fitness Tracker: workout routines and progress.

• Meeting Minutes: important points from meetings or conversations.

• Event Planning: parties, weddings, guest lists, food, and schedules.

• Budgeting: monthly expenses and savings.

• Gardening Notes: when seeds are planted, when to water, tracking growth.

• Dream Journal: record dreams as soon as you wake up.

Can I add cataloguing my vinyl and CD collection which I’ve just started doing.

You can use Evernote for so much and you know what? It’ll only cost you a couple of coffees a month☕

Are you on a free plan? Are you leaving? Are you paying? Do you care?

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon