Wrapping My Head Around Evernote’s New “Free” Policy

Evernote announced changes to its ‘free’ plan. Let’s look at its impact.

https://daveedwardsmedia.com/2023/12/11/changes-to-evernotes-free-plan/

A couple of weeks ago, Evernote announced some pretty dramatic changes to its long standing free plan that caused a lot of concern and complaining. At first I wasn’t going to weigh in. But after reading a lot of comments and talking to a lot of people, I decided to share some of my ideas. Hi, I’m Dave Edwards I post weekly segments on Evernote most Mondays on Wednesdays, we discuss GTD getting things done and on Fridays, we look at productivity. Don’t miss any of my videos, subscribe below. Well, here’s what Evernote shared. They said that new and existing free users will have a maximum of 50 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. Why did they do that? Well, Evernote cited all of the improvements they’ve made in the last year, Evernote posted this.

For free users who have or who want more than 50 nodes and one notebook. We recognize that these changes may lead you to reconsider your relationship with Evernote. We hope that the free experience will continue to meet your needs, and then you’ll consider a paid subscription. If you’re interested in exploring Evernote, its full potential and supporting its future development. There are exciting plans in store for Evernote, and we’d love for you to experience them. Well, as you can imagine that announcement touched off a few complaints. If you’ve been following me and watching my Evernote videos, you probably noticed that when I demonstrate different functions of Evernote, usually, I use my free demo account. Every notes free account has been around for as long as I’ve been using Evernote. Yeah, I have a paid account and I see many of my clients switch to the paid account to take full advantage of all the features that Evernote has to offer. Now, let’s be honest, a lot of apps offer free accounts with the idea that once you get hooked, you’ll migrate to their paid plan. I’ve done that with Evernote and many of the other programs that I use. So if you want more than 50 notes in more than one notebook, you’re going to need to get an Evernote plan. The personal plan is normally just under $15 A month 1499. Us or you can get a discount. If you pay annually that would be 129 99 per year, the professional plans 1799 a month, or discounted to 169 99. If you pay annually. As you recall, whenever no boosted prices to these levels, there were also a lot of complaints. Between that and this announcement. The complaints have continued now, we all like and want free we don’t like paying for what we once got for free. Remember when newspaper websites started charging. People argued that news should be free. But of course reporters need to be paid and paywalls were the answer. So this is what I think of when I think about the cost of Evernote and the new limits on the free plan. Once upon a time the free plan made sense. The owners of Evernote have talked about fixing past problems and adding new features and they’ve gotten a good start on both. So your choices are these if you only have a free account here, limit your use to 50 notes in one notebook with those limited features, or you pay or I guess you’re going to find a new app or maybe go to paper and pencil, but a lot of the apps you’re gonna go to also have subscription fees. True many of them are cheaper than Evernote, but you have to decide what you need, what services are provided and what you’re willing to pay for. Originally, when I read about this new announcement regarding the free plan, I was concerned about its impact. One of the reasons I didn’t post about this earlier is because I wanted to take the pulse of my Evernote consulting clients, those that got back to me either said they were paying for it or they were prepared to pay for paid plan. So I’ve come around to the idea that the new plan makes sense, even though I would have done it differently. Look, I don’t work for Evernote. They didn’t ask me. But if their goal was to woo more customers and move people from free accounts to the paid plan. You know what I do? I would give every new subscriber a full service subscription complete with all the features for 90 days. Then after 90 days you either pay for your account or it gets restricted. This way everyone could see the power of Evernote

but they didn’t ask me so they’re going ahead with their plans. Fine. I value Evernote, its home base for my entire productivity system. I appreciate the features they’ve added and they resolved the technical glitches that they have. And I’m actually pretty excited about their future plans. When the New York Times erected its paywall, I wasn’t happy because I also liked free when my local newspapers started charging for its online content. I subscribed because I valued the product. I pay for an upgrade to iCloud and many other programs. As long as Evernote remains a powerful productivity tool, I think it’s worth the money. But as they say, your mileage may vary.