QUESTION: Any more thought gone into lifetime premium memberships?

[psionmark 73]

I spotted a thread from a couple of years ago on this subject, but couldn't see anything since.

Has this been given any more consideration? With over 6,500 notes in my EN, I'm not likely to be going anywhere else any time soon, so a Lifetime Premium account would be ideal for me.

[heather 604]

You're absolutely correct, this has been discussed before:

As "the 100 year startup", we'd like to think that we'll be around for a long time. This comes up every now and again in business development meetings, and we cannot decide on what the meaning of "Lifetime" is. Currently, we actually have deals with some mobile phone carriers (Docomo, Orange), where you get a year of Evernote Premium for each new phone you register on your account. So, in that particular case, it would be the lifetime of your phone contract (upgrade your phone, get more Evernote.) I had someone in Japan contact me recently whose next payment date is in 2016 right now from that promotion (no, he wasn't buying new phones just for Evernote.)

We've also decided to offer this type of deal with computer manufacturers (Like the Sony Vaio) and other hardware (LiveScribe) - buy partner products, things you may need for your own productivity, get more Evernote. As we get larger, there will be more and more of these opportunities. Who knows, someday there may be an Evernote Food tie-in at the grocery store (buy 10 of these items, get a year of Evernote), or your favorite guilty-pleasure restaurant (Spend $25 at Subway, get a year of Evernote).

So, for the present time, we feel that simply selling a "lifetime" subscription to Evernote would be cost prohibitive (We could always go off the deep end and charge something ridiculous like $3375 - 100 years x our annual price - 25%, but where's the fun in that? ).

We want to become part of your daily life, your everyday experience, and to do that we need to think outside the box a little.

[psionmark 73]

Thanks for the prompt and detailed response, Heather.

I'll keep an eye out for some of those promotions!

Maybe it should be age based, lol! There's no way I'm going to be around for another 100 years. I'm about to hit 50, so I'm guessing somewhere between 0 and 40 years would be best for me

[inerlogic 0]

thread necromancy and dead horse time....

 

So, for the present time, we feel that simply selling a "lifetime" subscription to Evernote would be cost prohibitive (We could always go off the deep end and charge something ridiculous like $3375 - 100 years x our annual price - 25%, but where's the fun in that? ).

We want to become part of your daily life, your everyday experience, and to do that we need to think outside the box a little.

 

that is RIDICULOUS
charge a one-time fee for the lifetime of the product....

VueScan scanner software, i paid a one time charge, i get updates for life...
my life or the product's life, whichever ends first...

lifetime NRA membership... $300 for me...
$300 for my 10 month old (she gets a much better deal than i did...)

or bump offline notebooks to the free side.... there's no reason a note made on my tablet shouldn't be available when i don't have a wifi signal....
 

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Remember that Evernote is not just a product, it is also a service. It is one thing to purchase a perpetual software license that grants your free updates for life. There is overhead as developers need to be paid, but your scanner software is not a service.
Evernote is, in essence, a cloud storage company. You need to pay for your little segment of the server storage and processor ticks devoted to storing and processing your data, which is done continually. You have to pay monthly/annually just like with Box, Dropbox, Crashplan, and so on, all of which are SERVICES. You aren't just paying for that app on your computer or the next update.
There are VERY few services that offer a one-time lifetime fee.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

thread necromancy and dead horse time....

 

So, for the present time, we feel that simply selling a "lifetime" subscription to Evernote would be cost prohibitive (We could always go off the deep end and charge something ridiculous like $3375 - 100 years x our annual price - 25%, but where's the fun in that? ).

We want to become part of your daily life, your everyday experience, and to do that we need to think outside the box a little.

that is RIDICULOUS

charge a one-time fee for the lifetime of the product....

VueScan scanner software, i paid a one time charge, i get updates for life...

my life or the product's life, whichever ends first...

lifetime NRA membership... $300 for me...

$300 for my 10 month old (she gets a much better deal than i did...)

or bump offline notebooks to the free side.... there's no reason a note made on my tablet shouldn't be available when i don't have a wifi signal....

As Scott said, there are very few SERVICES that offer a lifetime price. Well, there used to be those lifetime gym memberships...for all the gyms that are no longer around. Services are a whole lot different that club memberships or software. (All Evernote software is free. If/when one purchases Evernote premium, it's strictly for the additional features of the SERVICE.)

WRT offline notebooks...

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).

[vilasman 0]

Here's a thought evernote... I have a few notebooks that are storing family lineage information that I would want to be available for my children when they grow up. While I can pay the yearly fee while I am functional at some point I would like to pay a flat fee that would extend access until said child could take it over from me. If this is going to be evernote... there should be a way to keep notes into posterity

[DTLow 5,736]

On 2016-12-12 at 7:46 PM, vilasman said:

Here's a thought evernote... I have a few notebooks that are storing family lineage information that I would want to be available for my children when they grow up. While I can pay the yearly fee while I am functional at some point I would like to pay a flat fee that would extend access until said child could take it over from me. If this is going to be evernote... there should be a way to keep notes into posterity

Currently, Evernote has given no indication your notes will ever be deleted.
If you switch to the free basic account, you will still have read access to your notes.

I generate public URLs to my note collection, and create a table-of-contents note, also with a public URL.  
The notes are can be viewed in any browser

[Jake123 0]

On 3/9/2014 at 8:32 AM, BurgersNFries said:

As Scott said, there are very few SERVICES that offer a lifetime price. Well, there used to be those lifetime gym memberships...for all the gyms that are no longer around. Services are a whole lot different that club memberships or software. (All Evernote software is free. If/when one purchases Evernote premium, it's strictly for the additional features of the SERVICE.)

WRT offline notebooks...

I am getting close to retirement... What about a lifetime charge, but add a small surcharge... like $300 and $25 per year thereafter?

[Wanderling Reborn 185]

On 7/4/2018 at 10:19 AM, Jake123 said:

I am getting close to retirement... What about a lifetime charge, but add a small surcharge... like $300 and $25 per year thereafter?

Any “lifetime” membership can and will be terminated at some point. Service companies that offer lifetime memberships are typically in dire need of funding. Otherwise, it simply never makes sense from business perspective.

Your proposal is basically “Pay full price for 4 years upfront, then less than third of the price for as long as the user wants”. Worded this way, does this seem like a good deal for the company ?

Anyone worrying about long term storage of their data that has personal historic or sentimental value but is no longer acitvely updated should just export it to html. This format is never going obsolete - not in our lifetimes. And it can easily be searched.

[dixonbruce 16]

18 hours ago, Wanderling Reborn said:

Any “lifetime” membership can and will be terminated at some point. Service companies that offer lifetime memberships are typically in dire need of funding. Otherwise, it simply never makes sense from business perspective.

...

There’s a cloud storage service that is currently offering a lifetime subscription. It’s called  pCloud  and I wonder if this is sustainable.

[TK0047 422]

I generally don't believe in paying for stuff that you are going to need in the future (to a certain extent).

For example, let's say I will buy $20,000 worth of toilet papers over my life (probably a bad example but put any product), I don't need to purchase that up front. I know I will always need toilet papers, but even for a significant savings, paying for the future needs may hurt cash flow of a family, company or a person.

Even though, I use Evernote daily and have 14.5K notes, I wouldn't be so interested in a life time subscription as the annual costs are reasonable to me. From their perspective, not sure how they would price that and make it attractive to the users either.

 

[DTLow 5,736]

On 7/13/2018 at 7:10 AM, Wanderling Reborn said:

Anyone worrying about long term storage of their data that has personal historic or sentimental value but is no longer acitvely updated should just export it to html. This format is never going obsolete - not in our lifetimes. And it can easily be searched.

Evernote's long term storage of data is free; you just require a basic account.  In theory, this is "lifetime"

My data backups do include a weekly full html export.  
- If Evernote goes dark for whatever reason, I have access to my data..  
- It provides an alternative search mechanism.

[Wanderling Reborn 185]

23 hours ago, DTLow said:

Evernote's long term storage of data is free; you just require a basic account.  In theory, this is "lifetime"

My data backups do include a weekly full html export.  
- If Evernote goes dark for whatever reason, I have access to my data..  
- It provides an alternative search mechanism.

I was not talking about the cost, but long term survivability of product / service.

HTML is not going to be dead anytime soon.