AlanH

I agree, it is a "first world problem" really, as it is only an extra couple of coffees a month. But they haven't delivered enough functionality in tasks and calendars to replace the tools I am already paying for, so the increase is on top of those other things. The reality for me is it doesn't offer enough to mean it needs to be part of my paid-for tool set. But USD180 per annum is NZD290 which equates to 6 extra coffee I can have a month. I would rather have the coffees!

@Paul A. I suspect you are right on the restrictions on the free version. I'm only going to be using it as an historical archive. I won't be adding anything new to it, so as long as I can do simple searches, I will keep using Evernote. And perhaps in the future, they may give me enough reason to take up a paid subscription. So many new ways of doing things now that did not exist when Evernote first launched.

I was wondering the same thing, although I don't understand why they would choose to do that unless they want to be paid more for their "out-of-hours" support time.

New Zealand and Professional, why do you ask?

Well, I did contact support, and they did confirm that the 80% increase was correct, so I have cancelled my subscription with no acknowledgement from Evernote. So after more than 10 years, that is it. And for those of you who have not had an increase yet, I still wonder why what seems like a small percentage of users have seen such a large increase. Maybe they want to get rid of all the high-end users and simplify the product. Oh well, time will tell.

Yes, I did. They said it was something to do with the browser and suggested I use Chrome (which I was) so I tried Safari and it worked. So on 17 March, I become a non-paying user.

So I went to my Account page to cancel my subscription, and guess what, I can't! I go to my Account Summary, click on Manage Subscription (see the first screenshot), then the Billing option gets displayed, and there are not details displayed. These have disappeared in the last 24 hours. First time in my dealing with Evernote that I have wanted to swear at their actions. So they increase my subscription by 80% and now have removed my ability to cancel it. I can't wait to hear their response to this.

So I give up. I have yet another response from Evernote restating my increase to USD180, and they have not answered any of my specific questions. I've spent enough time trying to get an answer from them that justifies this level of increase. So I will be cancelling the auto-renewal on my subscription and using alternatives. The next comments are about what I will do instead, so if this is not of interest, thanks for reading this far! I've moved away from Evernote as my daily note application since Roam Research was released, and I have since moved to Logseq, and I am now experimenting with Tana. I'm finding Tana an excellent place to capture information and make it searchable with its combination of bidirectional linking, transclusion and super-tags, a very useful combination. Evernote is a very long way away from matching those features. I use todoist for task management and Fantastical for calendar management. Fantastical is particularly good at handling multiple calendars, and todoist offers very powerful capabilities for managing my tasks. Yes, I pay extra for those, and the integration of tasks and calendars that Evernote is developing into one tool is of limited benefit to me, and it is a long way behind these specialist tools. Evernote has become a document reference as none of the tools I've mentioned handle documents well. Over the years, I have loved Evernote's ability to find obscure documents because of its full-text indexing of file content, including the OCR of handwritten stuff. I have also used tags extensively as another way of finding documents. I'm a little surprised at what I will use to replace this use case - Google Drive. I use Google as the basis for my "business" (it's just me), so I have access to the full range of corporate tools Google provides. As you would expect, the search is at least as good as Evernote, and I can find any content in a document, including handwritten images. Over the past few days, I've started experimenting with Google's "labels" to replace the tags. My most common tags are for the organisation, person and project, so these structured ones seem to work well. I used to tag notes with subject notes, but I am finding I use Search to find notes related to subjects now, so I've largely stopped doing this. And Google also seems to be pretty good at "fuzzy" searches, such as when I misspell something in my notes. For example, searching for "corproate" in Evernote returns only notes where the misspelling occurs. Google returns documents where both "corporate" or "corproate" appear. And I can use these features without paying extra, now saving myself almost NZD300. As long as Bending Spoons allows me to access the archive of notes that Evernote is becoming for me, I will continue using it. But I am saying goodbye to the elephant as part of my toolset with regret and sadness. It has been through a lot with me!

At least there are two of us!

For those interested, I have had a response from Evernote that follows. Is anyone else having a plan increase in the 50% to 80% range? I'd love to know that I am not alone! -------------------------- Geoff T. (Evernote Help and Learning) Mar 8, 2023, 12:59 PST Hi Alan, My name is Geoff with the Evernote Technical Support Team, and I received this ticket from Anna regarding your billing inquiry. Reviewing the billing history of your alan@businessvalue.consulting account, I can see that this is the first increase in base pricing for your subscription since 2018. Instead, it looks like you upgraded to Professional service shortly after the new membership level was introduced in 2021 and were billed a prorated amount toward the overall price of $99.99 (this amount was paid with your renewal last year). This year's change in pricing is directly tied to a need to continue investing in our products and in improvements to functionality. I understand this likely does little to mute your disappointment in the increase in cost, but this is the reason you are seeing the change in your membership rate. With all of that being said, I do see that you are billed in USD rather than NZD, and that this is tied to your early upgrade to paid service when we did not accept payments in New Zealand dollars. If you'd like, I can help to move your account to billing in NZD with the same Professional rate plan. The price in NZD would be $224.99, which would be somewhat less in overall converted cost and might save you any foreign transaction fees. You would of course still have the option to cancel auto-renewal at any time. If this option is of interest, please let me know and I'll be sure to take care of the rest. Respectfully, Geoff T. Commerce Support Manager -------------------------- The things I take from this message are: Evernote believes I have not had a price increase since 2018, so I should consider this when I am thinking about the scale of the increase - first presented to me as USD180 for the Professional Plan annual subscription - an 80% increase over my current USD100 Professional Plan. They fail to take into account the increase that took place in 2021. They offer to change my currency billing to NZD224.99, which converts at today's rates to about USD150. So just by changing the currency, they have reduced the cost by USD30. I have asked why this was possible. USD150 is still a 50% increase over what I am currently paying. Evernote has not provided information on why my increase seems SO much higher than anyone else's that I can find. Is anyone else seeing a 50% increase in their costs? I would love to know why I am different!

Thanks for sharing this as it is a specific example I can use to ask why my quoted increase seems SO much more than any other subscription that I can find. Hopefully, they have just made a mistake in what they are presenting to me.

Yes.

So Evernote did get back to me, but I missed the original message. The TL;DR, the increase is real. Evernote wants me to pay 80% more to access the same set of features that I currently have. And as you will see from my billing history below, when they removed the Annual Premium Plan, I had to upgrade to Professional to retain the premium features. At least I got true boolean searching. So solely due to Evernote's subscription plan changes, my cost to use Evernote has increased from USD70 two years ago to USD180 due this month—only a 250% increase in cost. I have until the 17th to decide, but unless something changes, I have had enough of this approach to customers. The money is less of an issue in this case; after all we are only talking about 2-3 coffees (my currency of choice!) a month difference. It is more this significant increase with a very generic explanation to a long-term customer (and regular beta tester). These comments are from the email that I sent to them: "In addition to the increase in price, I am getting concerned about the lack of information you provide to your long-term users - and I include myself in that category. While there were things to criticise about the previous owners, they actively shared their work. I hope that the new owners change their current approach - the loyal following you have purchased deserve more than this desultory approach to communicating changes. Unless you can provide me with a much more compelling proposition other than I get to keep using what I already have for 80% more, you have lost a long-time customer." @PinkElephant And these are the facts as presented by Evernote. I wonder why some plans are changing so much now when others remain the same. I have asked why this is happening and if I get a response, I will share it here. Here is the clarification from Evernote: "Thank you for contacting Evernote Support. My name is Anna, and I'm happy to assist you today. I understand that you received an email that your plan's price will be increasing to 180 USD per year. With this, you want us to justify beyond the generic text included in the email you received on why you should stick with your current plan despite the increase in its price. I appreciate you taking the time to reach out to us regarding this matter and send us a copy of your billing history in advance. To begin with, allow me to clarify the history of your payments since 2021: March 16, 2021 - You paid 69.99 USD for an Annual Premium plan. For context, we removed this plan in July 2021. July 25, 2021 - You upgraded to Annual Professional, which is a different service level compared to the plan you purchased last March 16. Since this upgrade was made while your Annual Premium plan was ongoing, you got prorated credits (deduction on the plans' actual rates) for both of the subscription plans. March 17, 2022 - Your Annual Professional plan renewed at its regular rate in the amount of 99.99 USD. With regard to your main concern: I may not be able to provide a more detailed context regarding the specific improvements that we're currently working on since I don't have access to the app's roadmap. Rest assured that the increase in price is for the overall improvement of the application on all of our clients (mobile, desktop, and www.evernote.com) in order to serve all of our valued customers better."

@PinkElephant I hope your comment about the currency is accurate! I have still not had any response from Evernote, and the information on my account is very clearly USD, as I have already posted. I am intrigued that you are reporting your wife's experience as fact, while also commenting on the guess that has been made about the currencies as a marketing mixup. Do you have any communication from Evernote confirming this was true? I can see a situation where, because of time zones, Bending Spoons might want to charge more for support for areas out of their time zone than for users who can be easily covered. So NZ/Aus/Asia may well be charged more if that is the approach they take. I just wish they would respond to me!

Well, if it is a glitch, Evernote is taking a long time to tell me! I find it difficult to believe I have been singled out for this treatment so this "automatically-generated" update that consisted of the update on my account and an email suggests I am not alone. I look forward to their explanation of the "glitch." So a question for you @James | Headquarters, if you see this type of increase, when would a YouTube video or social media post be appropriate? The "glitch" makes an interesting statement about the new owner's quality control of change.

Wow! What have I done to Evernote to deserve the difference in pricing? I'm intrigued that the Teams subscription is the same.

Yes, I've noticed the same thing. The only way I could get to the comparison was by going to my Account Info, clicking on "Manage Subscription", and then clicking on "manage" under the title Account Level. I can't find any other pricing on the public site.

Thanks to those that have pointed out that currency possibility. I have asked EN support for more information, and if I get anything useful from this, I will advise. I hope that is the reality!

Where are you based, @eric99? I assume you are in the Euro zone as you see that currency.

Happy to share it again, and I've highlighted the relevant info so it is easier to see. I also include the screenshot from Evernote's site on the pricing of the different options. I'm really lucky! They are giving me a 1c discount off their list price . . .

The following clip shows the pricing I see when looking for alternatives to my current professional plan. Annual totals are: Personal: USD126 EUR118 Professional: USD180 EUR169 Teams: USD150 EUR141 I want some of what your wife has! She is getting a 50% discount off Bending Spoon's new list price. As an aside I might be better off with a single Teams subscription if they don't have a minimum number of team members. Are other existing subscribers seeing the same costs? I live in New Zealand. Is there consistent pricing in different locations?

Thanks for sharing that. The key-board opens the dialogue box to capture the information about the link, removing the need to right-click and select the option, but all the other actions remain. Still a lot more work to create links.

@Dave-in-Decatur, the links in other tools are as easy as typing "@This is a link" (Tana) or "[[This is a link]]" and the software will either give you a dropdown of related links or create a new note/page. In Evernote it is three step activity, right click on where you want the link, type the text and enter/paste the link, and if you want to link to another Evernote page, you have to click on "select note", and then enter text to see the matched notes. I may not be doing this the quickest way in Evernote, but I have tried to figure out faster ways so if they are there, I couldn't find the, suggesting the user interface is too complex. If this differs from how you create links, I would love to know how you do it. And AI? The difference between existing Evernote search and AI is the ability to find semantically and by context. Assuming it is a large-language-model, I would expect the AI to easily handle synonyms and misspellings - a simple example, I search for contract, I see returns for that, as well as agreement and other phrases that the tool infers, are a type of contract. You might be interested in this article that provides a useful introduction https://towardsdatascience.com/ai-search-algorithms-every-data-scientist-should-know-ed0968a43a7a

I've received "the" email advising me of my new cost to continue to use Evernote. This will mean that, to retain the same category of features, my costs have gone from USD70 to USD180. I clearly have a choice to make, but the new owners of Evernote are not giving me any guidance on the new features. Will they apply to me? Is a cost that has increased by a factor of 2.5 in the last two years really justified? I was hoping that Bending Spoons would provide more usable functionality. But to have this scale of price increase, on top of what Evernote had already done without providing a reason to stay, appears to be a move to drive long-term customers away. And @PinkElephant, if you haven't already, have a look at Tana or Loqseq or Obsidian or Notion (or even Roam Research) for much more usable implementations of bidirectional linking. Evernote's implementation takes a lot more time to both create a backlink and make use of a backlink. It is an improvement but falls well short of the more usable implementations out there.

I agree, I think the direction that EN is going is in the right direction, but they need to retain their user base with so many other options out there than have existed before. Taking an action that "demotes" a long time user from the top level of single user functionality to the second tier, does not seem consistent with the need to retain users.