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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

I can't comment on the tech stack and all that, since I didn't see the internals, but I think Evernote deserves at least as much credit for saving Notion. Evernote used to have a real free plan and it cost only $3/month or something to go premium. Notion's "1000 free blocks" was confusing and honestly not that helpful, nobody knew who they were, and they were selling a premium plan for more than Evernote (who everyone knew and trusted). Notion's pricing and free plan strategy was a disaster from my perspective. It's understandable that this is an ad for Figma, but there were definitely other issues.

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Gonna have to disagree, I thought Notion's free-for-a-certain-number-of-blocks pricing was great. It let you try the platform without limits on functionality or limits on time. If you signed up for an account but then forgot about it and came back 3 months later it wouldn't be expired like a one month free trial would be. I think it makes a lot of sense for any platform based around content creation.

> thought Notion's free-for-a-certain-number-of-blocks pricing was great. It let you try the platform without limits on functionality

The problem was that it was difficult to know what a block was or how much you could do with 1000 blocks until you had invested enough time in the platform to be able to estimate how many blocks you might need to evaluate it.

Then there was additional mental overhead of trying to conserve blocks to extend your free trial. Do you implement something the correct way? Or do you maybe cut some corners to use fewer blocks so you can stay on the free plan a little longer? This extra decision making step added a little bit of fatigue to every interaction, which isn’t what you want when users are trying to evaluate your tools.

Typical trials have well-defined and easy to understand limits in units that users already understand: Users, bytes, projects, documents. If users have to learn your project before understanding the terms, it’s mental added overhead.

I don't think the kind of people that are overly worried about not using up their free trial generally make good paying customers.

Here was my experience: my team signed up, started using it, tried out all the different features (none of which were behind a paywall), didn't hit the 1000 block limit, and started paying within a week of signing up because it was exactly what we were looking for at the time.

I was one of the people that saw the free 1000 blocks and chose not to signup, because I didn't understand what that gets me.

I am currently happy on the free-tier and would cheer-lead internally at my job if there was interest to migrating to Notion.

I was one of the people that saw the 1000 block limit and just signed up to avoid the hassle of even thinking about it.

I wonder how the total numbers of people that did each of these things compare.

You could always create another free workspace, and move pages between them. Once you got tired of that, you bought an account. Happened for us, and I think it was a great way of pulling us in.

Something related: more than a decade again, I was working as a sales engineer selling an enterprise search engine. A common pricing model we publish is charging $X per gigabyte of search index [1]. This sounds like similar rationale, because it feels like an honest pay as you use scheme. But it's hard for customers to understand how much they would be using. And of course since it's an enterprise solution, there is heavy switching costs playing into the equation — both into our product and if they adopt it, away from it.

[1] The size of search index depended on the amount of content indexed as well as heavily on the features that were turned on. E.g. pre-index search-term expansion would increase the size by a factor, and so on.

Evernote has been really stupid recently. They created a new version of their desktop app which does not include all the functions of the previous app. I can't even set default font and size now. I had to use their legacy version. This totally breaks the trust and I am moving my stuff out and will no longer renew my subscription.

Evernote also refuses to create multiple level of notebooks and manual order of notes. They also have strange user accounts on their user forum proactively denounce feature requests. Every time I search for a new feature request supported from many users will end up see a few familiar accounts claiming you don't need the new feature. I was like, who the heck are those people?

I don't participate in the Evernote forums, but I have been a heavy user of Evernote since 2014, and I've seen other simple apps that I liked and depended on go into an obnoxious feature spiral as they desperately tried to unlock a higher level of market share, leading to degradation of usability and reliability. I'm happy for Evernote to let the product "stagnate" in a form that is useful and reliable for me, so I can understand why some people are vocal about Evernote not expanding their scope.

However, if they take away my ability to set the default font size, or create multiple notebooks, I will probably leave as well. Taking away multiple notebooks would break a lot of my use cases. Maybe I am already using the legacy version?

Sorry with the confusion. "multiple levels of notebooks" is a separated topic. And I forgot to type "levels of"...

But if you didn't notice the change of default font and font size, may be you are using the legacy version.

Evernote has been really stupid recently. They created a new version of their desktop app which does not include all the functions of the previous app.

Sounds like what Microsoft did with OneNote the Windows 10/Microsoft Store app vs the desktop application with significantly more capability though I believe the Win10/Store version is expected to catch up at some point.

The new Evernote desktop app is terrible. It’s slow as molasses (Electron?), search is not reliable, and without connectivity it doesn’t work (you don’t see your local notes). Adding notes via the dedicated email address doesn’t work anymore. They are adding new features of little or no value while letting the essentials rot. I’m a long time paying customer, and I have been recommending it to many people, but now I’m preparing to leave too.

> Evernote also refuses to create multiple level of notebooks

I remember asking for this over 10 years ago in their user forums, only to get some volunteer evangelist (who wasn't an employee and didn't have an official title but spent hours a day on the forum) claiming it "wasn't needed".

I gave up on Evernote when I realized they were spending more time on branding instead of features and reliability. And the constant in-app advertising nagging me to upgrade from Plus to Premium didn't help. I was already paying them money, I shouldn't have been treated like a free user.

> I remember asking for this over 10 years ago in their user forums, only to get some volunteer evangelist (who wasn't an employee and didn't have an official title but spent hours a day on the forum) claiming it "wasn't needed".

This is exactly what I found a couple years ago. These people were under many threads with new feature suggestions. Not sure whether they are still there. They do find a purpose of their life. Lol.

As someone using Evernote for ~10 years, it has been terrible for me recently too. I have been getting a "Sorry, we’re having some trouble loading Evernote Web." error about 80% of the time I open their web app for the past 1-2 weeks.

This thread is the first time I even heard about notion, but since they are getting so much praise here and since they made it so easy to import my notes, I just switched over.

They have been stupid for a long time now. I pretty much stopped adding new notes to Evernote back when they changed the web app.

It’s looking like I will have to write my own note app if I want something that does what I want and is going to last so I don’t loose my notes every decade.

Most communities have regulars with a consistent angle. There's always a "no new things!" person or three on product forums.

100%. Encountering the “1000 free blocks” after I ported over all my notes left a really bad taste in my mouth.

Ive since deleted the account and moved to an internal note taking system. Anytime someone asks me about Notion I actively recommend against using it.

Why would you recommend against using it when your issue is that you didn’t want to pay for it?

Notion has been free for personal use with unlimited blocks for a year or two now.

That restriction is gone. Notion is hands-down the best note taking system I've ever seen/used.

What makes it best at note taking in your eyes?

Not OP, but it's definitely the incredible flexibility of the system, especially the databases.

I basically track everything, from sideproject progress, CRM, personal challenges, workouts, books read, personal expenses, whishlists and todo with Notion in an unique way. While I'll be the first one to admit that the flexibility can be overwhelming sometimes, for basically every common usecase there are templates or YouTube tutorials

I agree with all of this, and I want to add that it's truly cross platform. Their web app is the same experience as their native app (this suggests electron but I'm not an electron hater and the native app is not a resource hog). It also has native builds across platforms, including mobile which is also well done.

There are other good note taking apps out there and there, and there are other note taking apps out there that solve the device problem I struggle so much with. But notion is the best note taking app with the best cross device/platform support I've come across.

I first encountered Notion in May 2020 and immediately fell in love with it's flexibility. I can organize and connect my thoughts/notes without the application getting in the way.

Linux, Windows, Android, Web... the service performs excellent across all platforms.

"nobody knew who they were" - https://twitter.com/ivanhzhao

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