Evernote to raise prices for Personal and Professional accounts | Hacker News Reader

Evernote to raise prices for Personal and Professional accounts

evernote.com

18 pointsgaws21 comments

Am I reading this right? A note taking app costs $15 monthly? What incredible feature could possibly justify this in a note taking app?

A quick search turns up quite a few FOSS candidates for note apps that you can use or even self host.

I guess I am missing something because I don't see why anyone would actually pay so much for this.

I think people pay to continue using the app they’ve been using for years and for access to their thousands of notes.

Even if they’re not completely locked in, a transfer + re-learning a new app may not be a feasible task for many.

So someone probably ran the numbers and decided they can squeeze more $.

Also, inflation.

The existing user base will be reluctant to leave, because they’ll lose access to their massive collection of notes in the Evernote proprietary format. They’re locked in, to at least some extent.

I pay for a some writing subscriptions, but they all use markdown as the file format. I can switch apps pretty easily if I ever want to leave

I used Evernote for years after switching over from Microsoft OneNote and every year the product got steadily worse. Fortunately the ENEX file format is nothing more than a giant concatenated file of all of your notes in a customized XML blend, and with a little bit of scripting work I converted all of my notes, attachments, and embedded images into markdown notes that I use with Obsidian.

I switched to Joplin a few years ago, and it was able to import my notes from Evernote.

My existing Fastmail account gives me WebDAV file storage, and Joplin can use that as a sync backend. End-to-end encrypted.

There are clients for macOS and Android. Neither of which are as relentlessly buggy as text editing with Evernote. Web Clipper browser extension. All open source.

I've had zero regrets about switching away from Evernote.

The other day there was some other bad news where the subject began with "An Update on...". Seems like that's the newspeak for "Bad news about...".

To be on topic, typical "My replacement for Evernote" comment: Joplin (with a server in a Docker container on my NAS) works well for me. There's even an import from Evernote feature, although when some sections of the Evernote note were password-protected, the same note in Joplin is some undecypherable Base-64.

Question: How many people actually refer to their past Evernote notes?

I ask because I hardly ever do, even though I've been an Evernote paid subscriber for many years.

I've used the Evernote Web clipper but then essentially never refer back to any of the clipped pages.

Ditto with scans-to-PDF for things such as receipts — for which the Apple Notes scan feature seems to do an adequate job. (We're an Apple household.)

I'm half tempted to just declare "scans- and Web-clipper bankruptcy" and abandon my Evernote subscription.

What's your non-locked-in, open source solution for note-taking that's zero dollars annually (as opposed to $129.99)?

Standard Notes [0].

[0] https://standardnotes.com/

Standard Notes has a free tier with end-to-end encryption, offline notes access, 2FA and password protected notes. Best part for me is the ability to use a custom editor instead of the default ones.

> Best part for me is the ability to use a custom editor instead of the default ones.

How does that work?

obsidian isn't open source but it's fantastic; standard notes has some issues that put it in the "do not recommend" category for me.

more recs that put SN to shame: logseq, dendron, foam

> standard notes has some issues that put it in the "do not recommend" category for me.

Like what?

Joplin is quite good as well

https://joplinapp.org/

Open source, uses Markdown, mobile apps, can sync with E2EE multiple ways. They also have a sync service you can pay for, but it's cheap and you can run it yourself if you want.

I'm paying $25/yr for syncing.

The iCalendar-standard (RFC-5545). CalDav supports VEVENT, VTODO and VJOURNAL (journal and note entries). Personally I use the jtxboard Android app and use DavX5 to sync to my Nextcloud server. Why do I use this? It's reliable and syncs well. All my contacts, calendars etc have been synced with CalDav for years reliably and easily without needing a proprietary solution like ms outlook.

Logseq.com may be worth considering. It's open source and free. No built in syncing on multiple devices, but, "syncing" via git to an online repo works sufficiently well.

That seems like a really steep increase. Moved a while back from evernote, at first using mostly apple notes but now obsidian which is a pretty amazing app.

+1 obsidian is great and all mmd so easy to migrate off if ever need to

Those are some very aggressive price hikes. At their scale, 500m users, they could charge very little and still make a profit. Also, they don’t have to invest that much in engineering anymore for a 15 year old (?) product.

My guess is that the party that bought Evernote just wants to extract money while they can, recoup the acquisition cost.

Google Docs has been my notetaking app for years. I used Evernote for 4 solid years, and got all my college notes in it. Back when exporting data was easy, I was able to get my data out. Now it's harder to export data and the UX has gone to garbage.

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