My last six months at Evernote | Hacker News Reader

My last six months at Evernote

alexkras.com

67 pointsingve34 comments

> Lock-in is the game. Users will pay. Many companies under-price their product and suffer the consequences.

Well, just yesterday the WSJ published an article [1] about bending spoons that include this detail:

> Evernote, a note-taking app acquired in 2023, was among the holdings Bending Spoons profiled in its IPO prospectus. Evernote’s revenue was 30% higher in 2025 than in 2022, and during that time average revenue per monthly active user rose 150%. What the prospectus didn’t say: Those figures meant the number of users fell 48%. Revenue rose through price increases as the customer base shrank.

So, a lot of users were not willing to pay.

1. https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/at-bending-spoons-the-...

That's bending spoons' business model. Buy a declining business and drive it into the ground by extracting as much value as they can from the customers still dependent on it.

It's basically the broadcom model for VMware. Sadly this model is very popular these days.

I'm very happy with obsidian these days though I don't use their sync service. The self hosted livesync is pretty good though a bit quirky at times.

Cached: https://yandexwebcache.net/yandbtm?fmode=inject&tm=178922753...

I remember using Evernote in the very early 2010s, pre acquistion, and before OneNote got really good/had a cloud sync service.

Evernote was...fine, but the UX was very stilted. Text placement was very restrictive, and the spontaneous nature of taking notes was suppressed by it generally forcing you to type linearly as if it were a Word document.

I used it for the ability to seamlessly sync between devices, but once OneNote 2013 hit, I dropped Evernote like a rock in a lake. It had no competitive drive in terms of functionality once MS wiped the floor with them.

“OneNote wiped the floor with Evernote” sure says a lot about how stagnant Evernote got.

Text placement being restrictive is exactly what I want. I hate onenote’s sloppy feel. That is how some people want it, but people like me don’t. Seems like there should be some ways to address both audiences

I left Evernote when it became increasingly bloated and clunky as a product (on iOS at the time), and as they started tightening the screws on the free plan.

My current generic note-taker is SimpleNote. It is Multiplatform, it syncs, and it's free. It does 1/20th of what Evernote does but that didn't matter.

SimpleNote has always been the standard to me for what note taking needs to be, but the lack of encryption makes it a non-starter for me. StandardNotes comes close.

Purely an aside but I went to the StandardNotes website and the first thing that struck me was how all over the place their AI generated product images were.

This service should not cost more than 3 dollars a month, for example most of my previously Evernoted friends used to migrate to Telegram free storage. Maybe Telegram provides only mediafile storage with no advanced search - but the search algorythm among your text document should not be significantly costier than GNU Emacs in Org-mode.

Stepan Pachikov is so great guy, I listened a lot of his talks. I am sad to live without his software, without screenshot editing software having red arrows of some specific form and without the search which worked really well. Good-bye yet another greedy corporation.

Hug of death? Archives don't have it either

The resource has died for me as well, but I used to read it when the post has appeared.

It's demoralizing that we live in 2026 and a modest level of traffic is still enough to take down half the web.

Google shutting down it's public cache made it even worse.

I've worked with a lot of "smart" engineers over my career with whom autoscaling is a completely foreign concept, or a half-baked concept at best. My favorite is devs pushing to migrate to k8s because it "scales" and won't hear a single thing otherwise.

You don't need autoscaling for a basic blog to handle the traffic of Hacker News. People have had "this page is hosted on <vintage computer>" sites hit the front page that have stayed up.

why do you need autoscaling for an (essentially) static website?

For a static blog you dont need that. My blog made the (near bottom of) HN front page last year. I didn't notice a thing until I looked at the traffic report (using goaccess). Static site generator with the result served from a bottom of the barrel Hetzner VPS, using nginx.

If a blog needs "scaling" of any sort you are doing it wrong.

Even hacker news itself runs on a single server without any scaling.

Look at the techempower benchmarks, even python stuff can handle 40k requests per second involving database lookups, and when things are cachable compiled/JITed languages scale to millions on 2 CPUs. And if you object that those are microbenchmarks, I have seen this in real systems too. E.g. converting a convoluted hairball of python, lambdas and SQS to a Rust service running on 2vCPUs reduced latencies from seconds to milliseconds.

The "If necessary I can add autoscaling later" mindset is what leads to bloated, slow websites.

Agree.

I don't think folks think clearly about how their setup scales computationally when they are choosing their stack. I've been writing a lot of software designed for drop-dead simple self-hosting lately (can run CGI-bin or as a standalone server, based on the env it's invoked in), and I put my own instances behind CGI, keenly aware of the risk on the open internet. But I design .htaccess so that the main server is hitting caches for anything anonymous. This works Just Fine for hitting the HN front page in my experience on a 1GB VPS, since the request never even makes it to my Python code.

I think folks just don't prioritize these sorts of optimizations.

Looks like the IP address is from Linode. So it could be a $5 VPS running an inefficient server-side framework.

I currently host my personal Web site as static files via AWS CloudFront. But even static hosting on a $5 VPS with Nginx might handle an HN surge fine.

I host my AI-generated code portfolio site separately (to unambiguously distinguish it from my 100% human-written open source work), using github.io (seemed appropriate) with a custom domain.

>static hosting on a $5 VPS with Nginx might handle an HN surge

My personal site is hosted on this exact setup. Twice I made the homepage, twice I noticed no slowdown whatsoever.

The only problem is that in May of this year, when my SimCity 3k in 4k article was found by the HN crowd, its access.log bloated to 200Mb causing my logrotate script (that hooks in Goaccess) to blow up every time since when trying to process it, and this log has been growing every day since - because logrotate isn't doing much rotating!

When I can massage my VPS into processing it, I'll have the stats to enjoy.

I am very thankful to Evernote. In May/June 2016 they restricted their free tier to 1 device, which pushed me to migrate and in the process discover Emacs+org-mode, which I've been using since then along with syncthing. It was a game changer and liberated my notes so I can arbitrarily manipulate them in ways I couldn't have imagined doing with their app.

> The business could clearly be made profitable – Bending Spoons proved that in a few months. The problem was that Evernote had raised over $200M at a unicorn valuation and investors needed a billion-dollar exit. No amount of expense-cutting turns a $100M ARR note-taking app into a billion-dollar company.

I expect the same is true of Airtable.

I remember i switched from evernote to obsidian in a few hours

I made the same transition, and it felt very seamless. I didn't look into the Obsidian first-party sync service, since I was already using Syncthing at that point.

For even more contrast with Evernote: the fantastic Obsidian application lists eight employees and one cat on their about page:

https://obsidian.md/about

Same. Obsidian is a bit more DIY feeling, not as polished of an interface but it does exactly what I need… and their sync engine is fast as hell. I pay for sync. I know I don’t need to if I really wanted to run it for free, but it’s worth it (and 50% cheaper than Evernote soon, while supporting the company)

Here's a copy I pasted into a Gist: https://gist.github.com/simonw/3c5a53c012448456729bcfb19b661...

They just sent out pricing updates and it’s nearly doubling the price I was paying before. Their lower tier limits my usage and is still 75% of what I’m paying now.

It’s just accelerated my exit plan.

I would have probably still kept paying for Evernote if they just split the application into Evernote Classic (w/o any of the Collab, texting, bloat) and another with all the bells and bloat.

At the end, it was so bloated that there was a slight lag in the editor which made it infuriating to type on it. Switched and never looked back.

Very interesting tale. I’ve had to leave a tech job that simply pestered everyone until they left. It’s cheaper for them tat way but it sucked for all of uw.

Tl;Dr switched to UpNote, pretty happy.

I loved Evernote, it plus David Allen GTD changed my work life for the better.

But the bloat kept bloating endlessly. I filled in Evernote's surveys, I offered to double my payment for an Evernote Classic with just the feature set of 2012 or so. No teams, no chat, definitely no AI. Just my notes on every device, searchable and silently synced.

a great read, and sincerely no offense, but

a) "dead"? i guess its horn got sawed off and now it is a plain old horse.

b) i had forgotten evernote had notifications (it probably still does! i presume i turned them off around 2009 and the setting has stuck). i presume it's literally only feature release announcements and MAU-farming zero-party ads (aka feature existence proclamations), what else COULD it be?

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