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Overthink your pricing


Pete248

Idea

Maybe it is due to the fact that Evernote is still free for the basic account and the sharing functionality in the premium account got much better over the years.

But IMHO you can get 90% of the functionality of the new Evernote business with a single premium account, if you store all your business related content within a premium account and share notebooks for collaboration as writeable with the personal accounts of your coworkers (whether they are on free or premium accounts is their personal decission).

Doing the maths for a small company with 20 people would be $2200 per year for Evernote business vs. $50 per year for the current solution using one premium account.

Unless you downgrade the current Evernote premium sharing functionality to broaden the gap to Evernote business, which I really hope you will not, I wonder, whether the additional comfort in administration of notebook sharing is really worth the additional $2150 per year.

The additional traffic in the business accounts is a nice add-on, but I personally wouldn't want to pay for it, as I never exceeded my 1 GB/month limit, even not on the one premium account I scan all the paperwork of my company into.

My personal feeling tells me, that a client within a business account should not cost more than an individual premium account but instead less. See it like a kind of volume discount.

Instead the admin backend could be charged additionally and could cost a bit more than an individual premium account.

So my suggestion for an attractive pricing schema would be more like this:

Small Administration seat, max. 10 client accounts: $5/month

Big Administration seat, unlimited client accounts: $20/month

Client seat with 1GB/month data volume: $3/month

Client seat with 2GB/month data volume: $6/month

all prices for yearly payment cycles.

I'll bet you will sell much more Evernote Business accounts with bigger overall revenue, than with your current plan.

With the small Administration seat, this might be interesting as well for families, where your $10/month/client plan hardly is an option.

But of cause, you are the ones, who make the prices,

Pete

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28 replies to this idea

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Although I've mentioned, that I don't want to lengthen this thread, I somehow missed your post bit wanted to comment on a few points.

That's fine, I'm still happy as long as you're happy with your setup. If there are any issues you run into, would be happy to hear about it. We'll of course be improving Evernote Business, so maybe we'll catch you the next time around.

I have always a sympathetic ear. ;-)

Business Library is spans across our whole company. There are plenty of notebooks in our business library that I haven't joined because they're not relevant to me. I go through the list and join which ones are relevant. This mean I can go pull out information rather than have someone invite me. Small point, but personally, it's saved me a lot of time asking to be invited, or inviting people who I've forgot about (or are newly hired).

That's indeed something I find useful.

Business Quota yes for your setup it isn't too different, since your whole company can fit into a 1 gig monthly quota. I think we would go through that in less than a week (totally made up statistic, don't quote me on that). We're hoping to give businesses more than enough quota and it should be a big enough number that they don't even worry about it.

You always have people who love to contribute content into EN and those who hate to do. For the later 2 GB/month is complete overkill. They only access stuff occasionally but need the search functionality to find what they need. That is the problem with your current model. If one really needs everything packed-in, the 4GB volume for every user, constantly changing sharing requests due to staff changes, support requests regularly, it is not overpriced.

But is is a different view, if all your company's upload traffic fits within 1-2 GB, mainly used by 1 or 2 people feeding paperwork into the system? Maybe 4 other's using it mainly for clipping webpages (give each 50 MB which relates to about 1000 Clips each ) and 14 just accessing shared content. Works fine with a premium account but business notebooks etc. would still be welcome.

Anyways, thanks for posting!

You're welcome

Pete

Pete hits the nail on the head.

Also my last post on the subject for what it's worth. I'm pretty darn sure that most small company sysadmins will view the EnB value proposition in this way. In my view, EnB will enjoy far more success (profit) if they price as Pete suggests. In our case, as great as Enb might be, current pricing would never fly given alternatives.

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Stativarius, please stop posting the same thing in multiple threads.

 

My apologies!  I am obviously new to the forums and it seemed like there were too many discussions for anyone to see all of my posts... my misunderstanding has been corrected.  Thank you for responding anyway!

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Stativarius, please stop posting the same thing in multiple threads. I've seen ths exact reply posted by you today in at least four threads - it's bordering on spamming the board. It's not helpful either b/c replies to you are littered all over the board. You even posted this in a new thread you started. I have also replied to two of your other posts. The bottom line is that you'd need 100 accounts to get a deeper discount than premium is. So I don't know why you're so annoyed. Just set up premium accounts & pay annually. That would be cheaper than a sponsored account for four people which was $5/month.

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I don't see worth in a $10/month business account either, especially since I'm trying to run a household, not a company.

I just tried to set up Evernote for my family of four and was told that sponsored groups have been replaced by Evernote Business. I don't know about anyone else, but my family does not need $40/month worth of business accounts.

I also don't need to administer four separate accounts with separate billing... for my 2 children, my wife and myself. Nor do I want any of us to have to deal with the restrictions of the free plan. My children are homeschooled and will need offline notes. Their iPod Touches and iPads aren't always connected to wifi, I cant rely on a persistent connection for them to complete school work I should have been able to assign through an Evernote group account.

Even if I did set up four separate premium accounts with four separate billing plans, I still can't receive the discount that was available for groups of 3 or more. So now I have to pay $20/month for four people, or $180/year. There is no way my kids are going to use $90 to $120 worth of note organizing every year.

I wish I had opened a sponsored group account in November of 2012, when I first learned about them (before the creation of their carnivorous EnB plans).

•Premium plan is for individuals

•Business plan is for businesses

•What plan is there for groups and families?

Bring back sponsored groups, Evernote! Please!!

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Agree. Way too expensive. When you can get Google Apps for 4$ per month, who will pay 10$ for a slightly upgraded Evernote? Considering the very low price of Evernote Premium, I simply find the extra price for Business compleley our of proportions. Will not recommend any of my customers to even consider this, although Evernote has been a prime product for us till now. A shame really.

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I have to agree with the general sentiment that EV Business is expensive relative to the features that it provides and that we would utilize. Agreed, the shared business library is quite attractive. But, I can basically achieve this functionality with EV Premium.

As a small office, with a limited number of current EV users, I would love to roll out EV to a larger number of users who basically only require read access, with perhaps a minimal amount of uploading.

A reasonable pricing model to me would be essentially Evernote Premium pricing plus $10 per year for each business user for the additional functionality. After my initial upload, I really only use a small fraction of the upload capacity in the premium model. The shared business libraries along with some of the coordination of users sounds nice, but it isn't worth doubling the annual price of Evernote per users - at least in my opinion.

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You can still keep it simple by having it billed to the 1 account and just adding a $5 or $10 based on whether it has premium or business premium. Don't really see a problem here.

Maybe. I don't know how hard/easy it is, nor do you. However, that doesn't even address the administration factor. The part that says, "Ok, this ENB customer gets 2 gigs per month & this one doesn't."

IMO, there's really nothing more to discuss here. My comment was triggered b/c a poster above seems to think ENB should be cheaper than Premium, eventhough the ENB package includes more than the Premium package.

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The point Pete is trying to get across is that ENB should have different prices options.

We get the point. However:

Multiple plans increases the complexity of billing and administration which increases the overall cost of the service for everyone. Evernote have always kept billing simple, your are free or you are premium. Makes it really easy for everyone.

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If you had read my post carefully, you should have known, that I don't need 2 GB/month upload.

The fact that you may not "need" 2 GB month is irrelevant. It's part of the package. Just like many people don't "need" one GB but pay for premium service b/c they want some other functionality. In my case, I'm premium b/c I DO want the 1GB per month, the priority customer support & the larger note size. But I do not use offline notebooks, nor do I care about my PDFs getting OCR'd.

The fact that he doesn't "need" 2 GB month IS relevant to his point and one that I agree with. Fact of the matter is, they should have tiers of prices (as with many management systems have which have a tiered pricing structure based on number of users). I have been trying to implement a shared notebook as a central repository for information for a business of about 60 people. Only a couple of us contribute and maintain the notebook. The others only use it to get information from, they don't really use it personally, thus they have free accounts.

The point Pete is trying to get across is that ENB should have different prices options. Perhaps a tiered structure like: A free option for those to just have read access, a $5 option for those happy with their premiums and don't need additional GB per month, and a $10 option for the those that want a fully fledged ENB experience. This would make better sense than for me than to pay $7200 a year (60*120) when only a handful of us will be actively contributing. Also combine the fact that ENB doesn't FULLY support Windows Desktop version out of the box (http://evernote.com/business/guide/) makes it a hard sell for me. I hope they consider this as it is the deciding factor in my decision to migrate to ENB.

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If you had read my post carefully, you should have known, that I don't need 2 GB/month upload.

The fact that you may not "need" 2 GB month is irrelevant. It's part of the package. Just like many people don't "need" one GB but pay for premium service b/c they want some other functionality. In my case, I'm premium b/c I DO want the 1GB per month, the priority customer support & the larger note size. But I do not use offline notebooks, nor do I care about my PDFs getting OCR'd.

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I actually don't have an issue with the price of $10/user/month for Evernote "business" - I'm just disappointed that the service does not have business "security" in mind on the back end. Before the powers that be order this service, we need to ensure that my business notes are truly protected and segregated from other businesses. So far, after 3 support tickets with multiple replies I am not convinced. Sad really, there is no one else on the market like Evernote that is (dare I say it) "enterprise" ready. A seperate, protected VM on the back side would be a great start. Box.net does this for files.... I just wasn't it for free form notes. Hope I don't have to wait too long.

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Although I've mentioned, that I don't want to lengthen this thread, I somehow missed your post bit wanted to comment on a few points.

That's fine, I'm still happy as long as you're happy with your setup. If there are any issues you run into, would be happy to hear about it. We'll of course be improving Evernote Business, so maybe we'll catch you the next time around.

I have always a sympathetic ear. ;-)

Business Library is spans across our whole company. There are plenty of notebooks in our business library that I haven't joined because they're not relevant to me. I go through the list and join which ones are relevant. This mean I can go pull out information rather than have someone invite me. Small point, but personally, it's saved me a lot of time asking to be invited, or inviting people who I've forgot about (or are newly hired).

That's indeed something I find useful.

Business Quota yes for your setup it isn't too different, since your whole company can fit into a 1 gig monthly quota. I think we would go through that in less than a week (totally made up statistic, don't quote me on that). We're hoping to give businesses more than enough quota and it should be a big enough number that they don't even worry about it.

You always have people who love to contribute content into EN and those who hate to do. For the later 2 GB/month is complete overkill. They only access stuff occasionally but need the search functionality to find what they need. That is the problem with your current model. If one really needs everything packed-in, the 4GB volume for every user, constantly changing sharing requests due to staff changes, support requests regularly, it is not overpriced.

But is is a different view, if all your company's upload traffic fits within 1-2 GB, mainly used by 1 or 2 people feeding paperwork into the system? Maybe 4 other's using it mainly for clipping webpages (give each 50 MB which relates to about 1000 Clips each ) and 14 just accessing shared content. Works fine with a premium account but business notebooks etc. would still be welcome.

Anyways, thanks for posting!

You're welcome

Pete

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Umm...paying less for more services??? Double the upload limit...hopped up support... Really? That makes no sense ...

If you had read my post carefully, you should have known, that I don't need 2 GB/month upload. And I add, that IMO the average employee, who is not in charge to feed-in tons of paperwork to EN but mainly accesses stuff, doesn't even need 1GB/month. Unless he is using EN heavily for personal stuff, 100MB/month upload is plenty.

And Evernote is so easy to use, that I don't see the need for hopped up support in compare to EN premium support.

Are you happy to pay for the Ribeye, if all you want is a salad?

I fully agree with your statement, that EN people have to make a living from their work and I paid for a premium account almost over a year without using any premium feature simply because I found the concept great and wanted to support it. But it is a difference between contributing $50 per year for the idea and several hundred or thousand dollars.

I'm pretty sure the EN folks are not stupid.

I don't think this either. Suggesting a different/additional pricing schema doesn't make the current schema look stupid.

I don't want to lengthen this thread any more. I've made my point and Evernote may do with it, whatever they want.

As Brickey said, Evernote Business is not for everyone. In it's current incarnation it is not for me. For now I'm staying with my current setup but have a closer look at the competition, whether cloud based or not, than I would, had this first incarnation of EN business lived up to my expectations.

Pete

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My personal feeling tells me, that a client within a business account should not cost more than an individual premium account but instead less. See it like a kind of volume discount.

Umm...paying less for more services??? Double the upload limit...hopped up support... Really? That makes no sense, even if you want to factor in the "volume discount". Eventhough EN can be used for free for years if you choose to, it's still a business. The people who work there have rent/mortgages to pay, kids to buy school clothes/books for and groceries to buy. Not to mention the costs associated with simply the business of Evernote, including expanding capacity for all those free users out there.

I'm pretty sure the EN folks are not stupid. I'm also pretty sure they have a focused direction for EnB which may or may not fit in with a lot of users' situations.

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I've read your post but it hasn't change my mind

That's fine, I'm still happy as long as you're happy with your setup. If there are any issues you run into, would be happy to hear about it. We'll of course be improving Evernote Business, so maybe we'll catch you the next time around.

A few comments below to clarify. I don't think they'll change your mind since it sounds like they're not exactly suited to your company's setup and size. But they're more of things I've found personally useful.

For sign up, just to clarify for others, you can do either auto approval for your domain or invite individuals. For us, we rolled out Evernote Business internally to everyone. We're also hiring new people every week. So auto approval has made the process a whole lot smoother.

One account to pay for everyone makes sense if you're rolling out Evernote within your team or whole company. It sounds like you're currently having individuals pay for themselves, which is fine too. But if they were expensing it, it's probably easier to do it all in one place than approve a dozen expense reports.

Business Library is spans across our whole company. There are plenty of notebooks in our business library that I haven't joined because they're not relevant to me. I go through the list and join which ones are relevant. This mean I can go pull out information rather than have someone invite me. Small point, but personally, it's saved me a lot of time asking to be invited, or inviting people who I've forgot about (or are newly hired).

Business Quota yes for your setup it isn't too different, since your whole company can fit into a 1 gig monthly quota. I think we would go through that in less than a week (totally made up statistic, don't quote me on that). We're hoping to give businesses more than enough quota and it should be a big enough number that they don't even worry about it.

Anyways, thanks for posting!

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As the sysadmin of a 50+ employee green energy company I've been watching Evernote closely for these past several months. EnB has been of particular interest, but I'm afraid I cannot recommend it to the powers that be based on what I view as poor value given the current pricing scheme. For example; we currently pay $4 per user per month for Office 365 Exchange Online access - far more mission critical for us at this point. Although I'm sure EN will regain the functionality it's lost with its recent client "upgrades", at $10 per user per year, I am unable to make a case to upper management for making the move to EnB. In my view the cost for business users should be roughly equal to premium accounts in order for EnB to gain real traction. In the meantime, I will continue to point interested co-workers toward EN using personal accounts.

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Multiple plans increases the complexity of billing and administration which increases the overall cost of the service for everyone. Evernote have always kept billing simple, your are free or you are premium. Makes it really easy for everyone.

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Just FYI, I posted about my favorite parts of Evernote business here that might help explain: http://discussion.ev...um/#entry175613

I've read your post but it hasn't change my mind, that you get 90% functionality with a single premium account.

A few comments:

> Sign Up ... You can auto approve anyone on your work domain, which makes adding folks much easier.

Unless I have a company with several hundreds of employees, I prefer to control manually, who has access to which resources. It is like an "auto generate user accounts" feature on a unix server, which I'd never use. Sorry, but some tasks have do be done by human beings for security reasons.

> And like as groups, you also have one account to pay for everyone, rather than having individual expense their premium accounts.

I know, you already advertised this for Evernote groups. While this might work for families, where the income is shared in one or the other ways, I don't think it is something a company is interested in. Frankly from the company perspective it is even easier to just pay for their premium account and let the employes deal with the payment for their personal accounts themselves. And from the company perspective this is definitely much cheaper, see my initial post. And I'm pretty sure what 99% of all employees will say, if they have the choice between a free 2GB Evernote business account and $10/month cash. ;-)

> Business-level support is the good stuff.

Don't want to bash your support, it is not worse than the support of other companies of your size. But the 2 or 3 times I've contacted your premium support in the last 3 years due to loss of data on syncing or broken Applescript issues, the response didn't help much. In the end I had to develop my own workarounds. Well, I admit, my requests were not the kind of "asked a 100 times per day" questions.

> Knowledge Sharing - The business library is a great way to share across your company.

Still don't see the big difference to share notebooks from a premium account. You can add or remove individual accounts to/from the share, you can change between read only and read/write access.

> Business Notebooks - I've used a "centralized user" to create all team notebooks before and it is much nicer to be able to create and invite people without having to switch to another account

I agree, this is an advantage - but wouldn't call it a "killer features", see below.

> Business Quota - Notes created in business notebooks count against the business's quota instead of my ow

Sorry, but IMHO that is exactly the same with writeable shared notebooks on premium accounts. If anyone, invited to the shared notebook, adds content, it counts against the quota of the one who owns the notebook.

You easily could add "killer features" to Evernote business, that might be important enough for someone to rectify the much higher price for Evernote business. So far I don't see them.

I still think a readjusted price plan would be a faster way to draw premium users into Evernote business and in the long run the more profitable approach.

Pete

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