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Comment by jlmorton | Hacker News Reader

Back in June, I think, Evernote tripled their price, from $41.99 for an annual subscription to $129.99 for an annual subscription today.

The previous subscription cost was already too high, when you consider something like Google One with 100GB of storage is $19.99/year. Rather than raising prices, Evernote needed to be cutting them.

There probably exists some subset of users that find $129.99/year of value in it, but I'll tell you, it's never going to be very large, and it's just absurdly, comically over-priced now. Cutting features in the free tier is not going to move anyone to the premium, it's just going to erode their user base.

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Evernote peaked around 2013 and was loosing users ever since. There’s no way to salvage the product at this point, they squeeze the last drops of revenue from their piece of the market before it’s completely gone.

Look at the trend: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

They probably have a huge cashflow problem, for some reason. No idea why that would be, their app is simple, and they're not exactly putting out any groundbreaking features.

They also have a metric ton of data to sell to LLM inc. et al, which, you'd think that'd make it cheaper, but, they might really be in a hole and that alone can't dig them out.

They at least used to have mountains of tech debt from the days when the cloud was far less standardized.

It would be easy to point to their recent acquisition by Bending Spoons and say that they're squeezing the stone for blood.

I'd evaluated Evernote alternatives for years, but that ludicrous price hike was the kick in the pants I needed to finally choose one (UpNote, for its similarity to early Evernote and one-time $29.99 price for Premium) and migrate to it. Evernote does make exporting notes easy, at least. I moved and validated a decade-plus of them in an afternoon without any formatting or content issues.

There are plenty of notes apps out there now, and at least one company that actually wants business should handle anyone's particular use case. The only reason I can think of to stay on Evernote at this point is sheer inertia.

Timing it at the end of the year is also an immoral strategy - people are busier both at work and at home and are more likely to just pay and deal with it than to do the research and migrate to a new system now.

Some people will pay $129.99/yr to not lose their established setup/notes. Extractive pricing.

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