Changes to Evernote’s Pricing Plans | Hacker News Reader

Changes to Evernote’s Pricing Plans

blog.evernote.com

19 pointsgoeric10 comments

Here's a blog post that summarizes some of the changes:

http://lifehacker.com/evernote-limits-device-sharing-for-fre...

> Today, Evernote announced a change to its pricing plan alongside a new limitation for its free service. Both the Plus and Premium paid tiers get a price bump while the Basic plan now restricts you to just two devices.

> The biggest sting is the fact the free Basic plan now limits you to two devices per account, like a computer and a phone, two computers, or a phone and a tablet. You’re also still limited to just 60MB of uploads a month. The Plus plan is now priced at $3.99/month, up from $2.99/month (or $34.99/year), while the Premium plan bumps up to $7.99/month from $5.99/month (or $69.99/year). The price increase comes from what Evernote says is a “significant investment of energy, time, and money.” If you’re affected by the price change, look out for an email from Evernote letting you know what to do. The price change won’t go into effect until after August 15, 2016.

I don't use Evernote much, but I do like it and for $25/year it is worthwhile. When it is time to pay for another year, it looks like my price increases to $35/year, which I will probably pay for again, but maybe not. I am used to pricing on web services to slowly decrease, not increase.

Good thing I just paid for it yearly! But I would still happily pay for this even with the price increases, as long as Evernote continues to get better. I've noticed the strings of improvements recently, and now with Markdown support coming, it's going to be very promising, definitely up from a year ago when it was going through turmoil. Right now I'm just a happy Evernote user that literally has his whole life on the platform. I would be lost without it.

This is a shame, I love using Evernote but not enough to pay $50USD/year for it. I use it as a reference point for various software/commands and it's quite convenient that it sync's across all my devices. The encrypted text feature is handy for sensitive information too.

Dropbox with encrypted sparsebundles is a convenient enough replacement though.

I wish they would announce that they've made Evernote less buggy on MacOS and that they've removed all of the unnecessary me-too add-ons like "work chat". I'm a premium user but have been contemplating a switch to OneNote since Evernote crashes about once a day.

If you're spending hundreds of hours using a piece of software, paying about the price of a beer or fancy coffee once a month doesn't seem unreasonable.

Conversely, I use it maybe once a month. The free plan is still there, but there's a 2 device restriction and I don't have 2 primary devices and the web version is kind of sucky.

For me, $10-$12 per year is about what it's worth.

Not something we haven't seen before, culling unprofitable users.

Agree with the commenter that said the app is worth about $10-15, and should never have been made subscription-based.

I wish I could find it, but the CEO Phil Libin gave a talk about how to price goods. He split pricing models into 3 camps, based on how they deliver value over time:

1. Fixed price goods correspond to items where you realize the value upfront, then over time the good decays. Like food, physical goods like clothing, etc

2. Fixed price subscriptions correspond to services which deliver constant value over time, like a newspaper or utilities

3. Freemium subscriptions start free, then charge more money over time, and correspond to services which deliver increased value over time. Lots of free 2 play games work this way, with people paying hundreds of dollars as they get serious. He also argued that Evernote was in this camp, since as you store more of your information in Evernote, it becomes more valuable to you

So charging a one-time fee for evernote is mismatched with the value delivered. They would get payment as a one-time event but the more you use it, the more it costs them to support you, without you paying them more because you like/need it more.

Only looking at lifetime value delivered ignores the competition, much of which is free and easy to switch to.

Also support costs typically go down over time; most support effort is spent in onboarding and getting users up and running. Although now that you mention it, Evernote may have huge technical drag because they have bugs outstanding from over six years ago. Indeed, the only time I reached out to support (I couldn't install PC version because it was incorrectly detecting that I already had it installed) they weren't able to assist. $10 lifetime value may be a bit generous.

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