33 replies to this topic

[Kevin2]

Evernote Team,

Would you please consider making offline access available in the ios/android apps as a one time app upgrade charge? I think paying about $5 one time should allow us to have offline access to our information.

The monthly/yearly costs you currently have are way out of my price range for offline access to my data. I think your premium rates are reasonable for people who want to upload / store large amounts of information. But allowing us to have offline access to our data seems like something that would be justified with a one time charge/upgrade in the $5 range.

Evernote Users,

Please reply or click "like this" if you like this idea

[heather]

From our CTO:

We try to offer a very rich set of functionality for Free users, which you can use for years without paying us a nickel. But we are a business with employees who like to eat food and pay rent, so we must choose some set of features and capabilities that are reserved for paying customers to encourage some people (approximately 5% of all active users) to cover the cost of writing the software and running the servers.

Adding full offline synchronization to low-powered mobile phones takes many months of engineering to build and tune, so we've put that into the "pay" bucket instead of other options (e.g. charge everyone for the Android client).

http://discussion.ev...st-plain-wrong/

[JMichael]

The monthly/yearly costs you currently have are way out of my price range for offline access to my data.

Seriously? The monthly cost of Evernote Premium is about 1-2 cups of coffee per month.

[skellam]

Evernote Team,

Would you please consider making offline access available in the ios/android apps as a one time app upgrade charge? I think paying about $5 one time should allow us to have offline access to our information.

It all depends on your perspective. $5 a month is not just paying for "offline access to our information." Your $5 a month is paying for the servers, storage, development efforts, and daily maintenance costs of running a large scale cloud operation like Evernote (not cheap). Really, $5 (almost the price of a gallon of gas these days) is quite a reasonable price. Charging everyone to bear the costs of keeping the operation running that they depend on for storing their important personal information seems more "justified" but Evernote has chosen to give you all this wonderful functionality and storage for FREE. It would be great if they made the whole service completely free and charged no one anything to use all the functionality that they offer, but then we likely wouldn't have a service to use anymore. So I think it's better to be thankful that Evernote has been generous in allowing everyone to use most every feature needed for the average user rather than fault them for not giving everything away for free [charging a one time $5 charge is statistically indistinguishable from free ]

[GrumpyMonkey]

Evernote Team,

Would you please consider making offline access available in the ios/android apps as a one time app upgrade charge? I think paying about $5 one time should allow us to have offline access to our information.

The monthly/yearly costs you currently have are way out of my price range for offline access to my data. I think your premium rates are reasonable for people who want to upload / store large amounts of information. But allowing us to have offline access to our data seems like something that would be justified with a one time charge/upgrade in the $5 range.

Evernote Users,

Please reply or click "like this" if you like this idea

hi. i get why you would want to have offline notes, but i think evernote might be more amenable to your suggestion if you could offer an alternative revenue stream. they have a huge user base (23 million), but in order to supply services to that many people, they've got to monetize the service somehow. annoying and intrusive ads (i actually like the current ones)? mining our data and selling it to others? what would you suggest ?

personally, i want to see the company grow and develop -- the more money they get, the more users they have, the longer they are in business, and the better my service gets. five dollars per user wouldn't even by enough dry ramen for a developer to suck on for sustenance today while they slave away on their computers to keep everything going. i think five dollars a month for this service is a great deal. a gallon of gas. a cup of coffee a month. it's less than a month of hulu, and that service does nothing but rot your brain!

[BurgersNFries]

And...if you pay annually, the price is even less than $5/ month.

[heather]

<offtopic mode on>
Now that you mention Hulu, I'm really getting into http://redux.com/tv - and that's free. But it doesn't replace Mythbusters.
</offtopic mode off>

[SWSL]

I posted this elsewhere, but I think it belongs here.

I am trying out Evernote and now researching the problem of not having my notes accessible on my smart phone when out of range, which is often for me. I checked your pricing and that's just not going to happen. For some with good incomes, another ongoing bill for the rest of our lives may seem fine, but I avoid ongoing payments like the plague. $50 a year is $500 in ten years. Nope, I'm not paying $500 every decade for this convenience. I might pay $10 a year for this feature, not more.

I like Evernote, but the problem of paying to store stuff on my own smartphone breaks it and is making me look for alternatives.. You've created the niche, but you have to make it more workable for low income people or you'll just create a niche for another company. . There is always somebody else that is looking to pickup the slack.

Sure, charge for increased storage, high usage, yes, but don't cripple it. Or else make it very cheap to fix the broken part.

Just putting in my 2 cents.....there are already cloud-based alternatives to Evernote and the better Evernote do, the more likely that others will enter the niche. This problem will definitely be ripe for remedy with the competition. On the other hand, the more you offer, the harder it will be for others to usurp. And your sheer momentum will help offering more to remain profitable.

Anti-virus? Email? Office suites? All partially priced out of the market by competition with free and open-source options.

[BurgersNFries]

I posted this elsewhere, but I think it belongs here.

I am trying out Evernote and now researching the problem of not having my notes accessible on my smart phone when out of range, which is often for me. I checked your pricing and that's just not going to happen. For some with good incomes, another ongoing bill for the rest of our lives may seem fine, but I avoid ongoing payments like the plague. $50 a year is $500 in ten years. Nope, I'm not paying $500 every decade for this convenience. I might pay $10 a year for this feature, not more.

I like Evernote, but the problem of paying to store stuff on my own smartphone breaks it and is making me look for alternatives.. You've created the niche, but you have to make it more workable for low income people or you'll just create a niche for another company. . There is always somebody else that is looking to pickup the slack.

Sure, charge for increased storage, high usage, yes, but don't cripple it. Or else make it very cheap to fix the broken part.

Just putting in my 2 cents.....there are already cloud-based alternatives to Evernote and the better Evernote do, the more likely that others will enter the niche. This problem will definitely be ripe for remedy with the competition. On the other hand, the more you offer, the harder it will be for others to usurp. And your sheer momentum will help offering more to remain profitable.

Anti-virus? Email? Office suites? All partially priced out of the market by competition with free and open-source options.

And...I posted this reply to you. Please don't repost in a different section/thread just because you don't like the reply you receive. (Android vs iOS)

I like Evernote, but the problem of paying to store stuff on my own smartphone breaks it and is making me look for alternatives to Evernote.

Dude. Seriously. If it was stored on your smartphone, why would you need an internet connection??? You're paying Evernote to store your notes on THEIR servers that you can ACCESS from &amp; DOWNLOAD to your smartphone.

And although I posted this today in another thread, I'll repost here for you:

We try to offer a very rich set of functionality for Free users, which you can use for years without paying us a nickel. But we are a business with employees who like to eat food and pay rent, so we must choose some set of features and capabilities that are reserved for paying customers to encourage some people (approximately 5% of all active users) to cover the cost of writing the software and running the servers.

Adding full offline synchronization to low-powered mobile phones takes many months of engineering to build and tune, so we've put that into the "pay" bucket instead of other options (e.g. charge everyone for the Android client).

If you find another app/service that works well for you, then great! But to rag on EN for charging a measly (repeat, MEASLY) $5/month (something just under $4/month if you pay annually) for their work is tragic.

[SWSL]

$5 a month is not just paying for "offline access to our information." Your $5 a month is paying for the servers, storage, development efforts, and daily maintenance costs of running a large scale cloud operation like Evernote (not cheap). Really, $5 (almost the price of a gallon of gas these days) is quite a reasonable price. Charging everyone to bear the costs of keeping the operation running that they depend on for storing their important personal information seems more "justified" but Evernote has chosen to give you all this wonderful functionality and storage for FREE. It would be great if they made the whole service completely free and charged no one anything to use all the functionality that they offer, but then we likely wouldn't have a service to use anymore. So I think it's better to be thankful that Evernote has been generous in allowing everyone to use most every feature needed for the average user rather than fault them for not giving everything away for free [charging a one time $5 charge is statistically indistinguishable from free ]

bu


Ahem....Evernote is not "generous" - they are simply trying to find the sweet spot with their business model. If they charge everyone out of the gate and don't get much user base, it really doesn't matter how useful it is, it will have a small base. They are trying to build and offer a feature set that will lure everybody in while at the same time, reserving a few features for those who do really use it.and can pay.

The question is, who's going to subsidize the software and servers for this large user base and with what features for how much? What percentage will pay for a feature and conversely, what percentage will walk if a key feature is missing in the free version? What percentage will pay, based on the features withheld and how much to get those features? The percentage factor is very important for the price point. If you charge more, you get less people paying whereas if you charge less, you may make less on each payer, but have more paying. How many will pay at each price point? Is offering a lite version workable for getting more percentage to pay?

As far as "only two cups of coffee" point of view, it's a financial slight of hand to paint an ongoing, never-ending payment this way, and while most people fall for it, I and some others don't. If you do, I'd like to propose that you pay me the most minimal amount of money for showing you the real meaning of ongoing payment. ONE PENNY. How can one penny be much? Just send one penny to me. Every day. Anyone can afford one penny, right? On the other hand, I'll get $365 a year or $3,650 in ten years. For me, that's like getting half a year of free income every ten. For you, well, it's just a penny. Almost nothing.

What's really at issue is whether this is the best feature to use for sorting the super users or premium types out of the crowd and getting them to pay. And/or, if the pricing is right for this feature.

My comment is: not this feature, not this price. It affects very light users like I might be, and then paying $50 a year is much. I might pay a low one-time cost or accept more ads or another kind of limit.

I think that the storage-size feature or some other power features are better candidates. Or making you jump through some hoops to do it, but if you pay - no hoops.

Just sayin'. All this stuff eventually trickles down to us little people and the power is in the quantity of people, not the amount per person. A dollar a person...per month x 1,000,000 people is still a nice additional quarterly income.

[BurgersNFries]

it's a financial slight of hand to paint an ongoing, never-ending payment this way, and while most people fall for it, I and some others don't.

Then I guess you still live at home with mom & dad where you (personally) don't pay for utilties such as electric, cable tv/internet, water, trash collection, etc.

[Metrodon]

In the end, Evernote employees have made the company's stance very clear and I am fairly sure it isn't going to change.

If you feel that the cost/functionality balance doesn't work for you then you probably are best off looking or an alternative solution.

[GrumpyMonkey]

$5 a month is not just paying for "offline access to our information." Your $5 a month is paying for the servers, storage, development efforts, and daily maintenance costs of running a large scale cloud operation like Evernote (not cheap). Really, $5 (almost the price of a gallon of gas these days) is quite a reasonable price. Charging everyone to bear the costs of keeping the operation running that they depend on for storing their important personal information seems more "justified" but Evernote has chosen to give you all this wonderful functionality and storage for FREE. It would be great if they made the whole service completely free and charged no one anything to use all the functionality that they offer, but then we likely wouldn't have a service to use anymore. So I think it's better to be thankful that Evernote has been generous in allowing everyone to use most every feature needed for the average user rather than fault them for not giving everything away for free [charging a one time $5 charge is statistically indistinguishable from free ]

bu


Ahem....Evernote is not "generous" - they are simply trying to find the sweet spot with their business model. If they charge everyone out of the gate and don't get much user base, it really doesn't matter how useful it is, it will have a small base. They are trying to build and offer a feature set that will lure everybody in while at the same time, reserving a few features for those who do really use it.and can pay.

The question is, who's going to subsidize the software and servers for this large user base and with what features for how much? What percentage will pay for a feature and conversely, what percentage will walk if a key feature is missing in the free version? What percentage will pay, based on the features withheld and how much to get those features? The percentage factor is very important for the price point. If you charge more, you get less people paying whereas if you charge less, you may make less on each payer, but have more paying. How many will pay at each price point? Is offering a lite version workable for getting more percentage to pay?

As far as "only two cups of coffee" point of view, it's a financial slight of hand to paint an ongoing, never-ending payment this way, and while most people fall for it, I and some others don't. If you do, I'd like to propose that you pay me the most minimal amount of money for showing you the real meaning of ongoing payment. ONE PENNY. How can one penny be much? Just send one penny to me. Every day. Anyone can afford one penny, right? On the other hand, I'll get $365 a year or $3,650 in ten years. For me, that's like getting half a year of free income every ten. For you, well, it's just a penny. Almost nothing.

What's really at issue is whether this is the best feature to use for sorting the super users or premium types out of the crowd and getting them to pay. And/or, if the pricing is right for this feature.

My comment is: not this feature, not this price. It affects very light users like I might be, and then paying $50 a year is much. I might pay a low one-time cost or accept more ads or another kind of limit.

I think that the storage-size feature or some other power features are better candidates. Or making you jump through some hoops to do it, but if you pay - no hoops.

Just sayin'. All this stuff eventually trickles down to us little people and the power is in the quantity of people, not the amount per person. A dollar a person...per month x 1,000,000 people is still a nice additional quarterly income.

I have to take issue with your calculations, because one of them is way off the mark.

However, I think we see your point. You are not willing to pay this much for the Premium features, and you have a reason for it. I don't know what Evernote will do in the future with their business model, but whatever they decide, I hope they do a good job of it, because I'd like to see the app stick around.

[skellam]

As far as "only two cups of coffee" point of view, it's a financial slight of hand to paint an ongoing, never-ending payment this way, and while most people fall for it, I and some others don't. If you do, I'd like to propose that you pay me the most minimal amount of money for showing you the real meaning of ongoing payment. ONE PENNY. How can one penny be much? Just send one penny to me. Every day. Anyone can afford one penny, right? On the other hand, I'll get $365 a year or $3,650 in ten years. For me, that's like getting half a year of free income every ten. For you, well, it's just a penny. Almost nothing.

I really don't see the this as a compelling argument since giving you one penny a day would result in me giving you $3.65 in a year or in 10 years a whopping $36. For me, it would be nothing and for you it would be close to nothing as well. I understand the nature of their business model and, of course, they are not a charity and they expect to benefit from giving away their service for free to some users. But, I consider it "generous" when someone gives me something for free and let's me use it in perpetuity.

[GrumpyMonkey]

That's the calculation I was talking about

I think SWSL has stepped into a minefield here. I'll pick up some limbs and put together his request a different way. Let's all agree that having the Free app is good, and that there should be different service levels to separate the Free from the paid. However, where do we draw that line?

What if we had tiers? One paid 2.00 a month for offline access to notes. Another 2.00 paid for an upgrade in upload amounts. We could add another 2.00 to provide access to business-level use with expanded options for collaboration (note change tracking and so forth). I think this would make sense.

I think people are willing to pay, but perhaps some of them are looking for a way to justify it to themselves. Paying for five features when you want one is a tough sell, but with tiers and customization, even if you end up paying more, it feels like less.

[BurgersNFries]

That's the calculation I was talking about

I think SWSL has stepped into a minefield here. I'll pick up some limbs and put together his request a different way. Let's all agree that having the Free app is good, and that there should be different service levels to separate the Free from the paid. However, where do we draw that line?

What if we had tiers? One paid 2.00 a month for offline access to notes. Another 2.00 paid for an upgrade in upload amounts. We could add another 2.00 to provide access to business-level use with expanded options for collaboration (note change tracking and so forth). I think this would make sense.

I think people are willing to pay, but perhaps some of them are looking for a way to justify it to themselves. Paying for five features when you want one is a tough sell, but with tiers and customization, even if you end up paying more, it feels like less.

Yeah, but some things have greater costs than others. IE, more storage space? That's probably, mostly a cost simply passed along to the end user. OTOH, Dave Engberg (CTO of EN) has a compelling argument in my already quoted:

We try to offer a very rich set of functionality for Free users, which you can use for years without paying us a nickel. But we are a business with employees who like to eat food and pay rent, so we must choose some set of features and capabilities that are reserved for paying customers to encourage some people (approximately 5% of all active users) to cover the cost of writing the software and running the servers.

Adding full offline synchronization to low-powered mobile phones takes many months of engineering to build and tune, so we've put that into the "pay" bucket instead of other options (e.g. charge everyone for the Android client).

It ain't easy keeping up with technology. It's a moving target. So I can definitely see why this is (and should be) a premium feature. And maybe more than $2 per month. Just sayin'

And for those of you who think it should be free...EN's API is published. Feel free to develop your own app to do this. Would be interesting to see if anyone did it & if so, if it would be a 99 cent app...

[GrumpyMonkey]

That's the calculation I was talking about

I think SWSL has stepped into a minefield here. I'll pick up some limbs and put together his request a different way. Let's all agree that having the Free app is good, and that there should be different service levels to separate the Free from the paid. However, where do we draw that line?

What if we had tiers? One paid 2.00 a month for offline access to notes. Another 2.00 paid for an upgrade in upload amounts. We could add another 2.00 to provide access to business-level use with expanded options for collaboration (note change tracking and so forth). I think this would make sense.

I think people are willing to pay, but perhaps some of them are looking for a way to justify it to themselves. Paying for five features when you want one is a tough sell, but with tiers and customization, even if you end up paying more, it feels like less.

Yeah, but some things have greater costs than others. IE, more storage space? That's probably, mostly a cost simply passed along to the end user. OTOH, Dave Engberg (CTO of EN) has a compelling argument in my already quoted:

We try to offer a very rich set of functionality for Free users, which you can use for years without paying us a nickel. But we are a business with employees who like to eat food and pay rent, so we must choose some set of features and capabilities that are reserved for paying customers to encourage some people (approximately 5% of all active users) to cover the cost of writing the software and running the servers.

Adding full offline synchronization to low-powered mobile phones takes many months of engineering to build and tune, so we've put that into the "pay" bucket instead of other options (e.g. charge everyone for the Android client).

It ain't easy keeping up with technology. It's a moving target. So I can definitely see why this is (and should be) a premium feature. And maybe more than $2 per month. Just sayin'

And for those of you who think it should be free...EN's API is published. Feel free to develop your own app to do this. Would be interesting to see if anyone did it &amp; if so, if it would be a 99 cent app...

The $2 is just a suggestion, and so is the content of the tiers. The point is that it might be better for Evernote to develop finer distinctions in its plans in order to generate more revenue, expand its paying consumer base, and please more customers (assuming that more flexibility and choices creates happier users -- I may be wrong!).

I don't think the OP or many others want something for free. Rather, I think what they want is to only pay for the features they want, and to pay less. Whether that is possible for Evernote is another matter. I was just trying to offer something for their argument beyond just saying Evernote costs too much. Without a viable alternative for revenue, there isn't much to talk about, especially if we want to see Evernote continue to enjoy success.

[heather]

http://discussion.ev...8308#entry48308

We don't currently have "a la carte" options to get each Premium feature at a different price, and would be a bit nervous about implementing all of those distinctions in every client. Managing all of that adds a lot of work, and may be splitting hairs a bit for a service that's very usable at the Free level and only $5 for all of the features.

http://discussion.ev...874#entry128874

... we've discussed a la carte pricing in the past and decided that, at least for the time being, we're not going to do that.

[GrumpyMonkey]

http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/10263-offline-access-not-premium-who-else-wants-it/page__p__48308#entry48308

We don't currently have "a la carte" options to get each Premium feature at a different price, and would be a bit nervous about implementing all of those distinctions in every client. Managing all of that adds a lot of work, and may be splitting hairs a bit for a service that's very usable at the Free level and only $5 for all of the features.

http://discussion.ev...874#entry128874

... we've discussed a la carte pricing in the past and decided that, at least for the time being, we're not going to do that.

Thanks for linking to those Heather! Seems reasonable to me.

[JMichael]

Evernote, your pricing is a huge bargain as it is.
The upgrade amount is fair, easy to understand, and easy to process.

I wouldn't waste even 1 minute considering a change to a la carte.
Any one of the extra features is worth the upgrade.