It's not always about the decision itself, it's the rollout

[whydoIneedyetANOTHERname 4]

Every subscription-based service I've used over the last three years sent out emails, clear push notifications, etc. giving users a heads up of new free tier limits and pricing changes. And I have a lot. My Evernote has been buggy with loading issues, sync issues, and pop-ups freezing my notes for months. Since last summer. Across two laptops, desktop, and phone. I've sent tickets, emailed, tried to chat - nothing worked, no repsonse. If I use a product for a long time and then a pay model comes out with new updates  - I'll pay for it. Especially if there's a discount for year one. However, that's only *if* the experience so far has been pleasant. In this case, it hasn't. By definition I'm not a customer, I'm a user - but if your product gets to the point where it's impossible to use and I can't get it fixed by any form of contact, it's a good way to not ever convert me to a customer. 

 

I planned on switching to annual in August 2023 but began to lose notes, my phone would be days without sync, and I would get pop-ups for upgrades in the middle of typing on mobile which would crash the app and I'd lose the whole note. Some days it was literally unusable. Without support, I had to rely on online communities and Reddit threads to try to troubleshoot myself. Naturally, I held off on subscribing because I didn't have faith that paying would make things better. And the more I read, the more people confirmed that it wouldn't.

 

I noticed people often want to boil down rollouts like this down to people whining about price. But it's not just that. It;s the product. I want a relaible product that works with service that backs it up if something goes wrong. 

 

For me, this is probably the single most convulted, unorganized, non-transparent process I've ever seen from a modern app - paid or otherwise. The choice to make Evernote itself less usable week after week with no workaround while also not sending out a full memo on new prcing tiers (which again, is what I'm used to) did nothing to convince me to stay. The fake "scarcity" with me clsoing boxes that said "You won't see this essage again" just for me to get it 7 minutes later did not help me keep my sanity while trying to stick it out.

 

Evernote's path to getting people to stay and become loyal, paid customers in a sea of note-taking and productivity apps should have been by bringing users in on the changes instead of making people solve their issues in random blogs and online communities.

 

Troubleshooting and product problem solving should come from the company itself - users shouldn't have to constantly scour the internet to answer their own questions because your customer service is nonexistent. My boyfriend pays for his and had the same issues getting a hold of someone. So what's the point? I have never had a tech issue, loading issue, or anything else solved with an Evernote ticket. My last one is two months old and no one ever bothered to get back to me. I have never even got a response. Had you done a better rollout of this as well, I'd be staying and paying like I had planned. I have 37 subscriptions - alot of them paid for by work, some by me personally. I'm used to changes - especially price increases since 2020. I get the why, it's the how that isn't working. Once the experience becomes a pain and I'm spending more time trying to fix the issues I'm having rather than using it - I'm out. 

 

I've lost all patience. There isn't a single sbscription-based service I have (tech-based or otherwise) that has gone about it this way. Not in 2023, that is. Also a reminder that every user on Note Taking/Productivity Apps is not going to be a long-suffering, tech-savvy DIY'er. They are students, small business owners, indie authors, and random note takers. The expectation from some holier-than-thou users that the average person should just suck it up and figure it out is missing the point. Every user of Evernote coud have been better converted into a funnel where they became a loyal paid customer if things were clearer and got fixed faster from jump.

 

This is not how you revamp your business for profit in a streamlined, transparent way - this is how you lose users without bringing them into the fold and convincing them to stay over all the other products out there. 

[PinkElephant 8,754]

We have a wealth of excuses for not paying - this may be the one using the most words for the same message: No matter what the EN team would have done, there would always be THIS little thing preventing the user from subscribing.

• Too expensive (did not subscribe when there was a cheap PLUS subscription neither)
• More updates (when legacy did 1-2 updates per year)
• Less updates (when v10 rolled out one update every 2-3 weeks)
• ... to be continued

Let's be honest: There are users who did and who will never subscribe. The difference now is only that before EN allowed them to continue with the service year by year, with a little nudging, but otherwise undisturbed, and now giving them a model that will not do for an continued use. Who believed in his birth right for a free ride may be surprised now. But why give these users a head on warning ? They were there for years, they didn't contribute, they had enough time to sort things out, or to subscribe. If finally it's the day of change, it doesn't matter if it is nicely wrapped. These folks will never pay, "because" they always have "reasons".

If they now "find out" that they still won't subscribe, and blame this on the "way of communication", it is just another point to the list above of foul excuses for not subscribing. Forget this blame game, nobody wants to hear it any more. Take your stuff and leave, please don't slam the door.

[Wanderling Reborn 186]

21 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

We have a wealth of excuses for not paying - this may be the one using the most words for the same message: No matter what the EN team would have done, there would always be THIS little thing preventing the user from subscribing.

• Too expensive (did not subscribe when there was a cheap PLUS subscription neither)
• More updates (when legacy did 1-2 updates per year)
• Less updates (when v10 rolled out one update every 2-3 weeks)
• ... to be continued

Let's be honest: There are users who did and who will never subscribe. The difference now is only that before EN allowed them to continue with the service year by year, with a little nudging, but otherwise undisturbed, and now giving them a model that will not do for an continued use. Who believed in his birth right for a free ride may be surprised now. But why give these users a head on warning ? They were there for years, they didn't contribute, they had enough time to sort things out, or to subscribe. If finally it's the day of change, it doesn't matter if it is nicely wrapped. These folks will never pay, "because" they always have "reasons".

If they now "find out" that they still won't subscribe, and blame this on the "way of communication", it is just another point to the list above of foul excuses for not subscribing. Forget this blame game, nobody wants to hear it any more. Take your stuff and leave, please don't slam the door.

While I generally agree with your statement, the reason to give all users - even free ones - a generous warning before drastically changing any service is the goodwill. Show that you can be relied upon, and that even if you decide to change or eliminate some services, you're not going to just pull the rug from under your customers' feet.

I have a relatively pricey speaker which when I bought it was Cortana-enabled and "smart".  MS decided to kill Cortana, and turned my "smart" speaker into a dumb speaker. I learned my lesson, and will no longer buy any MS-branded hardware accessory that relies on long term vendor support to function.  (To be fair, the sound quality of that thing is still outstanding). 

With regards to Evernote, this is a moot point somewhat, since from all appearances, their business plan at this point does not seem to rely on attracting new customers.

At the end of the day, it's their service. 

[PinkElephant 8,754]

I don’t think the new plan is pulling any rug: All existing notes stay accessible and can even be edited. So everything that was there when the switch was toggled remains untouched and fully functional.

You just can’t add anything. I think it’s a rather soft intervention.

About growing the business: From how it looks they are still in the phase of safeguarding the foundations: Replacing technical debt, building the new team, learning their customer base. I don’t think they currently have a focus on winning new subscribers.

Will be interesting what will be the unique sales proposition when they switch on the marketing blaster ?!

[WilliamL 662]

I think the rollout has been poorly communicated. I think the greater problems mentioned here are FAR more concerning because they indicate that Bensing Spoons are not thinking about user experience. Pop ups that appear during writing which then crash the app? Wtf that should never be even a possibility. Notes going missing is still occurring for too many users. Evernote staff are once again silent on issues. 

another example - I went to cancel my sub on my phone, got to the final screen where a massive pop up box of 40% off annual appeared, but due to its size I couldn’t get to the x, pinching or scrolling etc wouldn’t work, so I couldn’t cancel. I’ll need to try on another device. 

[PinkElephant 8,754]

The last described „too large popup box“ is nothing new. It happens on iOS devices when in the device settings, display or accessibility a larger than usual text is selected. This drives stuff off screen.

Badly coded, but as I said nothing new. Probably they use the same template again and again, to fill the screen with their „amazing“ popup.

Lower text size, and the X appears.

[Feitz 262]

On 12/7/2023 at 10:54 PM, PinkElephant said:

There are users who did and who will never subscribe

And there are users who subscribed almost from the start, financed the whole mess of V10 and have exactly the same experience as the lady who opened this thread.

And some people feel compelled to instantly deride or ridicule users who state the obvious. Sad. 

With zero support from the owners this forum is the only place to vent their frustration and hope that BS will read the comments and improve their communication and the whole product. The way it's going I doubt Evernote will survive much longer which would be a shame since it has a unique feature set compared to other notes apps.

For a start a public bug list would be great to see which bugs have been registered and are worked on and when they will be solved. This would save a lot of redundant support tickets and relieve BS customer support. 

[Dave-in-Decatur 4,004]

1 hour ago, Feitz said:

The way it's going I doubt Evernote will survive much longer

As usual, search the forums for this and similar thoughts.... Years of them.

[Feitz 262]

46 minutes ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Years of them

deservedly, V10 was a nightmare from the start and Legacy did work but was stagnating for years...

[PinkElephant 8,754]

Can’t confirm. v10 was buggy in the first releases, true. On iOS I remember v10.6 being the first fully usable version, on the Mac it probably was similar.

From then it worked, in general. With the release of Home and Tasks it had outgrown legacy. On the other hand legacy degraded pretty fast with new releases of MacOS.

2 years after the launch of v10 legacy was functionally dead on a Mac with the recent MacOS version. RIP

[Dave-in-Decatur 4,004]

4 hours ago, Feitz said:

deservedly, V10 was a nightmare from the start and Legacy did work but was stagnating for years...

I'd say v 10 was a nightmare at the start, and has steadily improved, added and re-added features, and strengthened. Which is why Evernote is not about to perish.

[Feitz 262]

17 minutes ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Which is why Evernote is not about to perish.

I do hope you're right but the wealth of issues that keep popping up don't make me so confident. 

What bothers me most is that these issues always seem to affect only a fraction of users (as far as can be told from forum posts, forum represents only a small number of users) so these in my view could more likely be infrastructure related than code related (replication between servers, timing issues etc.)

 

[Wanderling Reborn 186]

On 12/8/2023 at 2:48 PM, PinkElephant said:

...

Will be interesting what will be the unique sales proposition when they switch on the marketing blaster ?!

Indeed. At the end of the day, as the "natural attrition" of paid users continues, they will need to find a way to attract new customers. Unless, of course, the plan is to milk that cow until it drops dead of natural causes.  They certainly have enough paid users right now to keep a healthy revenue stream for quite some while, and the future of this entire service segment is rather unpredictable right now.

[Dave-in-Decatur 4,004]

22 minutes ago, Wanderling Reborn said:

the future of this entire service segment is rather unpredictable right now

... and yet we try. Plucky little folks, aren't we? 😄 Me included.

[Brian Handscomb 28]

I didn't even know about this change until reading the discussion board which I only visit every couple of months... Reminds me of the 10.x rollout which was released WAY before it was ready and Evernote only ever addressed the issue on desktop with "Legacy", never mobile.

[PinkElephant 8,754]

Personally I think it could have been announced. What would it change ? From a quick facts check nothing: Who is affected can buy Personal by the month. Or grab his stuff and leave. Or subscribe.

Nobody needed an invitation to run his stuff on a Free account for years. Nobody asked if this was a sound platform for anything essential, Free as it was. So why should anybody be invited once, twice or how many times to think it over ?

The only reason I can see is that maybe a user who would have returned to EN later now holds a grudge, and won't do it. Obviously BS decided to take this risk. If you want to argue about it, better do it with them via feedback or a support ticket.