GustavusHarding

You missed the part where I said that Evernote "fail[ed] to provide an inexpensive plan with basic functionality". I don't, in fact, "want it all". I don't want all of the unnecessary features that they've tacked on in the past decade to justify the ridiculous price of their Personal plan - I just want a simple rich text editor with decent search and sync functionality that works smoothly on mobile & desktop devices and the web. "Free" with 50 notes and 1 notebook is useless for anything other than a trial. The Personal plan at $160/year doesn't provide enough value to me, and there isn't anything in between. As a developer, I very much understand that the free plan as it existed was a loss leader, and that the company has clearly decided not to keep it around in perpetuity - though before the sale to Bending Spoons, clearly the company did find it useful as a way to convert free users to paid ones. IMO, Evernote missed an obvious opportunity to provide a reasonably priced "lite" plan to consumers, but there's now a number of other competing services available at a more competitive price point for those who don't want all of the bells and whistles. If the company's plan was, in fact, to do that and replace the formerly-useful Free version by converting users to a cost-effective plan, then they missed the boat by failing to announce their intentions. Perhaps they determined that a lite plan would fail to convert enough Free users to compensate for cannibalizing of Personal-plan users who would gladly switch to a lower-priced option if it was available. The company likely know there's a market for it, but decided that those customers aren't worth it unless they're spending $100 per year. If Evernote is trying to get Free users to leave their platform, then it's mission accomplished. At any rate, the undocumented change rolled out to a subset of users shows an obvious lack of care and/or clarity of communication from the company. I expect that Bending Spoons will continue the trend and will aim to extract as much value as they can from their subscribers in the coming years.

After about 13+ years of use, and Evernote consistently failing to provide an inexpensive plan with basic functionality, it looks like they've finally driven me to use another service with this ill-conceived and unexplained change.