Request for Family Plan Pricing (not the first such request)

[NYCJC 33]

Good Day,

I've made this request previously, but will do so again given the new company ownership. I'd like to request a Family Plan subscription be put on offer.

Background:

I've been using Evernote for 13 years consistently. Like many other users I'm frustrated by many things: Increasingly heavy-handed pressure to move to the new client; Android client functionality (specifically, attachment handling which worked perfectly in Legacy); and a lack of (actually useful) feature development. But, honestly, all of these concerns are minor in the scheme of things.

Above all that, I'm most disappointed with both the tremendous recent price hikes, and the manner in which Bending Spoons chose to communicate them.

I have, for years, been paying 4 subscriptions - for myself, my spouse and our two children. While I very heavily use Evernote and regularly go through the exercise of justifying my own subscription (I've investigated a half-dozen alternatives since the recent price increase and still see Evernote as best-in-breed for my workflow), none of my family members use a double-digit fraction of the functionality I rely upon. Yet, our usage still requires me to purchase Personal subscriptions for each. A huge annual financial outlay!

As it is while you have me as a continuing paying user today, this pricing structure has me constantly on the lookout for a cheaper alternative. I would think there is SOME value in having happy customers content to pay their annual fee.

Please consider adding a Family Plan pricing structure.

Thanks.

John

[agsteele 3,069]

It sounds like you might be better moving the rest of the family to a free plan. Of course that will depend on how much data they use and the number of devices. If they can be content with the web client when they are on desktops or tablets and mobile for phones then they might be able to work happily on a free plan. That would certainly give you a more economical solution.

Otherwise, you can advocate for a Family plan but I doubt it will be along anytime soon. I'd suggest you also give your feedback to feedback@evernote.com as well as here.

Good luck with your request.

[WilliamL 667]

I would agree with this - a family plan would be an excellent idea and would be really useful. 

[NYCJC 33]

Thank you, agsteele. I had attempted the free option a few years ago and it didn't work for them for some reason. I'll try again with the youngest when her renewal rolls around. I'd considered this, but thank you for indicating it might still be a good idea.

I will also do as you suggest and send a similar suggestion via feedback.

Thanks again for responding on the community's behalf.

John

[Bitec 8]

I fully agree with the topic author. The free account is basically useless now as has a ridiculous restriction of one notebook and 50 notes. It was ok a year ago though. I realized I need a full account for my wife now when she's starting the courses though we use family accounts in many other applications.

[playwithdirt 2]

I joined the discussion to see if I could figure out if there was a family plan option! Evernote is so useful for students, and my husband and I have been using it forever. It has made an enormous difference in reducing the paper in the house. But the cost of multiple personal subscriptions is getting ridiculous. Ideally, Evernote would offer a Family Plan with some of the Teams sharing functionality. AND look into integrating with Canvas for students and teachers.

[PinkElephant 9,003]

You can do the math yourself. It wouldn’t be much below the Teams subscription for the same number of users. Which means probably much above what you are willing to pay.

[Mark8 4]

I've been using Evernote for 6 or 7 years and my current version is Pro, I really like it. My wife has the free version. We use it for family stuff and I also use it for work tasks. Incessant pop-ups to upgrade on my wife's version are making her really mad, to the point we may have to go to something else, and if we go that direction, I'll most likely cancel my subscription as well. $100 a month for a casual user, such as my wife, is steep, so an affordable tier for this kind of use on your app is in order, don't you think?  Either that, or dial back the harassment to upgrade for free tier users. Seems like there's a market there for a family tier based on previous posts to this thread. 

BTW I didn't really want to air this out in the public forums, but couldn't find a customer service contact mail, so here it is. 

[NYCJC 33]

1 hour ago, PinkElephant said:

You can do the math yourself. It wouldn’t be much below the Teams subscription for the same number of users. Which means probably much above what you are willing to pay.

This was a pretty authoritative response. Do you happen to have justification details for the current pricing scheme? And I do use "scheme" meaning all senses of the word. It was a much better and more full-featured product 10 years ago - at 1/3 of the price. Cloud storage has gotten more inexpensive over the ensuing years, no?

10 years later, the product's at a functional standstill (even though there are annoying, full-install Windows upgrades once a week). Core functionality hasn't improved, user feedback is summarily dismissed; any improvements seem to be made in service of the current product owner, rather than its users.

And before you ask, yes I'm bitter. Long ago, Evernote was a shining example of productivity software done right. Both it's useability and my confidence continues to be eroded year upon year.

John

[PinkElephant 9,003]

Everything was better and cheaper 10 years ago - and I hope you don't remember how it was 50 years ago. This was - WOW.

But today is today, and you should not deviate from your original intention: You said you wanted a Family subscription, with stripped down features of a teams account.

And I told you to do the math behind it yourself, of course comparing TODAYS Personals subscriptions with TODAYS Teams subscription. Which results in finding out that your family subscription may be a nice dream, but hardly a realistic plan.

One reason is that it would completely run against the pricing and feature scheme currently established. The second and maybe even more important reason: Nobody could stop smaller companies to define themselves as a happy family, and use such a Family Plan instead of a solid Teams subscription. This way the idea kills itself, by the iminent threat of loosing revenue.

And even if everything is so cheap today (LOL), nobody really wants to sink his revenue this way. So I doubt your Family Plan is around the corner, any corner.

[Bitec 8]

I don't want to do maths. I know I've family plans for Youtube, Netflix, Amazon Prime etc. Now that my wife has started a new course I just installed Joplin and let her save the notes there for free. We don't need tasks, AI or whatever - we just want to store notes. I've been on Evernote for too long and also I got a 50% discount so I bought the plan but I see absolutely no need to spend 100€ on another family member as well (and this was solely her decision btw). 

So food for thought - is Evernote that better than competitors that the whole families will pay 4x personal account prices? I cannot answer for everyone but my family's answer is NO. These days we have quite enough regular financial commitments and the value of Evernote is not so high to make it indispensable. Family accounts would be tempting on the other hand as they'd show the company real purpose to please their constant members pulling their family members into the "community"

[PinkElephant 9,003]

You won't see this happen, at least not any time soon. All movement was into another direction.

You can use a paid account as sort of a hub, sharing notebooks to Free accounts, and creating the notes in these notebooks from the paid account. The notebooks and the notes will not count against the Free plans limit then. They will still be subject to the note size limitation - a Free user can only save up to 25MB per note, even on these shared ones.

That's it what can be done now - take it or leave it.

Remember we are users here. If you want to talk to EN about your idea, you need to contact support.

[Mark8 4]

Evernote has essentially kicked my wife off the free version now. I poked around the announcements and it looks like there is no consideration for expanding Evernote in the direction of more affordable consumer plans at the casual use level. I use a ubiquitous office productivity suite that not only offers many of the same features as Evernote, but also spreadsheet, publishing, word processing, and data management capabilities for around the same price I pay Evernote. The software is clunky and aggravating, and Evernote is better than it in the note niche, but both my wife and I have this other suite for our businesses, so we can share, create, and so forth, including notes. I really like Evernote and I would not mind spending a reasonable amount annually for an stripped down version for my wife and kids, but at $100+/seat annually for moderately casual use (Personal), that's steep. I don't see why it would be so difficult to offer pricing that would allow families to use the product; it's well suited for this in it's current state. I probably won't renew at the end of my annual membership; by then I can probably migrate everything off Evernote. 

And for the drunk:

In real dollars, storage has been dropping roughly 40%/year and software is much better than 10 years ago. I define "stripping down" as setting lower data storage thresholds, and maybe fewer features; with AI, that could be accomplished with minimal cost. Yes, I'm a user, but foremost a customer with a fistful of dollars I'm going to take and spend somewhere else.  Companies that "establish" rigid pricing and feature schemes while ignoring customer sentiment and feature requests typically don't last long in a market economy. Good luck.

[ATBeck 2]

I see it the same way as most people here: Evernote has become too expensive for families. I buy a Pro account, but won't subscribe to another one for my wife, who really only uses Evernote for one purpose and very rarely at that. This constellation - often supplemented by 1-3 children - is very common, most people will not book several Premium and Pro accounts. Evernote is missing out on a lot of potential customers here. 

In my opinion, in the course of the constant curtailment of the possibilities of the free account - currently: 1 device, 1 notebook and a maximum of 50 notes - it would have been imperative to offer such a family account in order to pick up the many families that have so far relied on a paid account and several free accounts. 

The problem that small teams could use such an offer to switch from the expensive Team account to the Family offer could be reduced by further upgrading Evernote Teams with special and newly developed features for companies and teams. 

The way Evernote is currently pricing itself, it is in great danger of alienating one of its most important target groups - families and the self-employed.

[Edward Almasy 3]

Paid Evernote user for eight years here, and an unpaid evangelist for Evernote for most of that time.

The lack of any sort of usable family option finally has me actively working to switch to another platform, as the absence of a family plan and the current restrictions on the free plan have made the occasional (but necessary) sharing of notes with my spouse unworkable.  (Not going to pay an extra $130/year so she can use it a few times a month.)

I doubt I'm alone in this.