Wanderling Reborn

On 12/6/2023 at 11:18 PM, abdu said:

My use case of Evernote is just having a bunch of notebooks with notes and some of the notes having images. Syncing between two desktop Windows machines. I use search. No mobile devices. I am not interested in tags, pdfs, OCR, scanning or any advanced feature.
I am not liking the price of $130/year for the way I use Evernote. I believe there should be a less expensive plan for light users. The free plan is unusable for me.
 

With these requirements, Joplin seems like a perfect candidate. I don't use it for a number of reasons that you're not interested in.

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. 

On 12/6/2023 at 7:07 AM, Wanderling Reborn said:

Does Joplin still permanently change attachment filenames when exporting a notebook ? This was my primary issue when I tested it but that was a couple years ago. I use lots of pdf attachments and not losing the original filenames is absolutely crucial.

Well I decided to check for myself and, lo and behold, they fixed this issue. Now when I export my test notebook as HTML or MD, all attachment names are preserved. This was literally the biggest problem I had with Joplin.

I also tried exporting a MD file with attachments and a table from Onenote (using the Onemore plugin) and it imported to Joplin - not as an exact copy (markdown tables are not great), but a whole lot better than I expected. Now if they add OCR and freshen up the iPhone app… it could be interesting.

On 12/4/2023 at 5:33 AM, bengan said:

I am not an Evernote user but my wife is and evernote-backup saved my/our day. Quite frustrating trying to help with a platform like Evernote when everything seems designed to be locked down. Anyway, thanks again. Now the quest to get her to use something more open like Joplin (my note taking app of choice).

Does Joplin still permanently change attachment filenames when exporting a notebook ? This was my primary issue when I tested it but that was a couple years ago. I use lots of pdf attachments and not losing the original filenames is absolutely crucial.

Try this fix. It should work system wide.

https://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-save-mac-screenshot-as-jpg/

You can print to PDF if you’re using the web client.

If all you use is plaintext notes (which is what it sounds like), just use plaintext files saved in iCloud. You can still use Spotlight and Finder/Files tags to search for them, and you don’t depend on any service that requires exporting notes down the road. Apple Notes adds yet another level of complexity that is really not justifiable for long-term storage notes unless you need rich content (attachments, tables, handwriting etc).

5 hours ago, Paul A. said:

They don't scan personal user content for AI training, per their privacy policy. They do use publicly available information for AI training. They scan for viruses, spam, CSAM, for attachments so they can link to Drive or Photos, for user-specific AI features, and so on. Nothing nefarious.

They also allowed users to turn off location tracking yet tracked them anyway, by deliberately burying two different settings in different places in User Settings, both had to be manually turned off otherwise they still tracked you even if you explicitly disabled location tracking in one place but didn’t know about the other setting.

https://apnews.com/article/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb

So, is there a comprehensive list of everything that Google does scan your emails for, or are they just saying what specific use cases they are not implementing ? 
They didn’t stop email scanning out of the goodness of their hearts, they were being sued and faced a potentially disastrous damage if they lost the class action lawsuit filed on behalf of the millions of people who were not Gmail users and who never agreed to Google’s T&Cs but still had their emails mined. (Of course there was no guarantee that this particular lawsuit would succeed, but it was just a first salvo). 
They are also being sued for mining user data in Incognito mode in Chrome, and tying it with that specific user’s data profile. Google’s response? “Well we never said that we won’t track you in Incognito mode”. 

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-08-google-toss-lawsuit-potentially-incognito.html

I don’t think they are trustworthy, period.

3 minutes ago, Paul A. said:

FYI, Google hasn't scanned Gmail content for advertising purposes for over 6 years.

"For advertising purposes" is the key here. They announced back in the summer of 2016 that they would not use email scans to personalize ads, not that they would not scan emails for any other purposes. Google's FAQ today states "we do not scan your emails to show you ads". Which begs the question, are they scanning them for any other purposes (virus scanning obviously, but also criminal content, AI training etc.)

On 10/31/2023 at 8:41 PM, mackid1993 said:

I also want to add, there is NO cloud. Just someone ELSES computer. Using a free cloud service for anything remotely important is extremely poor information security practice and anyone who does that and then complains about it really should take the time to educate themselves about Information Security.

I don't trust my critical data to anything that I don't pay for or host on my own network. That is also why I use only paid email with multiple custom domains that I own and have full control over the DNS of. 

Those using Evernote free or any free cloud service for anything besides recipes for banana bread are taking a massive risk.

Everything is on someone's computer. The difference is, when you store info in the cloud and maintain local backups, your data is spread across multiple computers, so it has better chances of surviving in case of a server / drive failure. Personally, while all major services have had data loss accidents, they are still far better set up for both preventing the losses and recovering from them, than an average person or a small business. I have my data on three separate removable drives, on two different computers, and on Onedrive. Onedrive has saved my behind several times over the years. Anything I don't want them to see goes into an encrypted Cryptomator vault. 

If by "Information Security" you mean controlling access to your data... well email always has at least two recipients. Unless you have strict control over what addresses you are emailing, most emails you send or receive will go through MS or Google servers on the other end. I myself use Proton mail, but I am not kidding myself - it does not buy me privacy, just makes it a little safer on my end. It is still possible for every email I send or receive to be compromised on the other end.

10 hours ago, gazumped said:

The 'free' alternatives either show you adds,  sell upgrades as part of their process,  or sell your activity data to others to fund their services.  Evernote do not.

On your other point I've already seen one user say "50 notes is fine - I only need 36" - and it is enough to see how Evernote works.  If you want to use even part of the full service and you need more than 50 test notes,  then you need to subscribe.

Sure. But for a very large number of customers. ads, upsells, and / or privacy issues are not as important as features and cost. I mean, how many Evernote users have Gmail ? Talk about data mining...

When Evernote appeared, or rather when I was looking for my first mobile-accessible data organizer around 2010-11, there was precious little competition. You had Google Keep (which is actually an excellent service, data mining concerns aside, but back then, from what I remember, little more than sticky notes). You had Onenote, which would have been my natural choice since I've already heavily used it at work, but it was hopelessly underdeveloped on mobile (even on their own Windows Mobile platform, it was almost feature-less). You had Springpad, which I actually liked a lot (it was sort of a cross between Evernote and Keep) but they went to some stupid Instagram-like visual design before going belly up. That was really it... The market was growing like crazy, and Evernote was what everyone talked about and the first thing people tried.

Now, you have a whole lot better Onenote mobile clients, Keep has matured and AFAIK supports PDFs and text OCR, you have Notion, Obsidian, Bear, UpNote, Joplin, Zoho (that has quietly matured into a pretty decent thing from a quick glance), and some more obscure services like ClickUp which offer data management on top of their project management tools. I am sure there's a few I forgot about. More importantly, there are pretty robust OCR and search tools built into cloud storage services like Onedrive / Google Drive / iCloud - have that existed 12 years ago, I'd probably never look elsewhere. So while the "free" or less expensive alternatives may not work for you or other people like you who have grown very reliant on EN and the specific ways it works, they are going to absorb the bulk of new potential users coming onto the market - simply because a free tool that works well enough will suffice for most.

3 hours ago, Boot17 said:

I think exactly this. Even pre-Bending Spoons, Evernote stopped allowing new sign-ups on the lower cost Plus plan around 2018 (?) I believe and then stopped allowing new sign-ups on Premium once they introduced the higher cost Personal and Professional plans. If they now introduced even a lower paying tier than Plus, you might get some free users to start paying that, but you'll also get a lot of $129 per year people thinking at some point they could also get by on just that. Without that lower subscription lifeline, you have to choose between staying or going and they know that those of us that are invested will most likely stay (as long as that price isn't too outrageously high -- which it now is for some).

Exactly. Evernote had insufficient free-to-paid conversion rates ten years ado, when the mobile device market was going through explosive growth, and there was little competition. They are not going to perform the growth strategy any better now that the market has stagnated (ok, matured…) and there’s a lot of competition. They do however have a large number of deeply invested paying customers for whom no other service will replace Evernote because no other service is a copy of Evernote. Raising prices is a natural strategy - as long as they are careful enough and don’t lose too many paying legacy customers (and they won’t, not at these price levels). 

We are already seeing a lot of such rent-seeking behavior, and it’s only going to get worse as the market, realistically, matured about seven years ago. The old “charge little, bring in more” model was a pyramid scheme fueled by the initial smartphone and tablet boom.  

9 hours ago, SWSL said:

Actually, many long term customers have been paying in at now eliminated levels.  When our renewals come up and our cost rises significantly, there will be some who are not big users or don't have enough disposable income that opt out unless there is a workable option.  

As far as server usage goes, monthly upload limits has been one of the ways to distinguish levels from the start.  And, as most of us know, many many apps and programs offer good utility for a regular plan while locking out cool features that business, power and/or high income users will not want to miss out on.  

There is always a decision with a business about pricing.  Do you price higher and make more on fewer users or do you price lower and depend more on economy of scale.  In this product servers are not the only expense.   Management, maintenance, development. initial buyout etc. all contribute to the cost of the service and these can lower per user as numbers go up.  

Again, I'm seeing many corporations dealing with this so that they can have it both ways.  They get the most out of customers who have the money to pay premium while offering a good enough product for those who might be otherwise excluded from the customer base.   An example is cell service.  Post pay cell service in the US is very expensive but you get priority and support.   The same companies also now run somewhat separate prepay businesses that use the same network but deprioritize data and minimize customer support.  It works.  Everybody gets what they can afford and the companies get more business off the same network. 

Some will leave, but some doesn’t equal all.

As long as the % of legacy plan customers leaving is less than the % of cost increase, the overall revenue is going up, not down.

With the price of service almost doubling, it would take over half of the formerly grandfathered paid plans customers leaving to have a negative monetary impact. I think it’s clear that the EN owners don’t believe that this is going to happen. If even a third leaves, and the remaining 2/3rds are paying 90% more.. do the math.

Lowering prices is done for two reasons - to attract new paying customers, or to prevent the existing ones from leaving. I don’t think they are treating attracting new customers as a major priority (and haven’t been for a while), and the existing paying customers are already paying, why provide them with an option to pay less ? 

2 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Here's a fairly random thought: If free users, or new users who use the free account as a trial (its intended purpose), decide to subscribe in sufficient numbers, the increased income may enable BenSpoo to hold prices at (close to) this level for a few years. IOW, a big price increase (for free and grandfathered cheap users) can lead to a leveling off of prices.

This really depends on what their long term goal is - growing the service, maintaining it at roughly current levels, or earning max ROI.

I think it’s fairly obvious that growing the service is not currently their goal. Stress on “currently”.

I also think that, barring some spectacular developments, in the long term there will be net reduction of paid user base due to the natural attrition . The service is just not currently attractive to a generic new user who is not already deeply invested in it, and the established legacy users aren’t going to stick with EN forever - people find shiny new tools, retire, or … well.

So, either they develop some major new functionality that makes Evernote significantly more attractive and brings in more paying users, or they will be forced to raise prices again as the number of users continues to decline.

And, introducing a lower cost tier at this point would be a very risky move, as it’s likely that it would attract significantly more current paying customers than new ones, thus decreasing the net revenue.

I don’t think that the prices will be lower unless they decide that they want to grow the service at the cost of profits. 

12 hours ago, mackid1993 said:

I just saw a post on Reddit r/evernote with someone complaining that they want an alternative and they had trouble with Joplin and couldn't find a way to contact support. Sorry if I violate the code of conduct here but some people are really really really stupid and cannot be helped in any way. It's really an entitlement problem that people have. Like they are entitled to excellent customer service from that free, open source app. That subreddit is only people complaining that their free thing costs more money and anyone who points out that the competitors that do A LOT less cost only $30/year less anyway get downvoted.

Instead of paying for Evernote just go use Google Keep and let Google data mine your notes to target ads at you, that's what free is. 🙄

Bending Spoons needs to just stop calling it a Free plan and call it a Trial plan. Give users a time unlimited Trial that allows them to create 50 notes or one notebook prior to paying. Let the complainers complain for a while and eventually they will find something else or pay up. In the end getting rid of the freeloaders will save Bending Spoons more money than the people that will leave and not pay for a subscription.

I signed up for Evernote, paid for a month of Personal, played with it for a few days then paid for a year and then later prorated to Professional. $169 is a lot of money for me but this product offers a ton of value and is worth the cost.

That subreddit really needs some moderation. It's an everything but Evernote subreddit.

Joplin actually has excellent support via their user forums. Developers are very active and helpful there.

It’s not for me, for a number of reasons that all have to do with Markdown limitations and the lack of (or the implementation manner of) a few features that I use all the time. I also have my general doubts regarding inherent (in)security of community developed FOSS software.

But if these limitations don’t impact you (and to be fair, it’s likely that they don’t affect most users), and you have no gripes about using a few 3rd party plugins to expand the functionality of desktop application, Joplin is actually very good. And you can’t beat the price.

Evernote is lacking an affordable basic paid option, and I think it’s fairly obvious why. But, it’s their choice.

Reading the announcement, EN are not forcing free users to delete the excess content, they  just won’t be able to add any more notes until they fall below 50 notes in 1 notebook limit. So there’s nothing “classless” about this.

I agree with the lack of an affordable basic plan - but again, nobody owes anyone anything outside making sure that the existing user data is safe and accessible. There are alternatives.

13 hours ago, gazumped said:

I don't think it's a question of forcing people to contribute - imagine how much it costs to maintain that many individual accounts with anywhere between 10 and 1,000 notes plus connecting to users if/ when they access their data.  I don't think Evernote can avoid keeping existing user notes in free accounts for another 12 months or so,  but getting occasional users to move to another service if they're determined not to pay Evernote should massively reduce the number of daily connections to the system.

f some existing free users decide to subscribe that's extra icing on the cake;  but not carrying this unsustainable drain on resources should improve subscriber experiences across the board

I honestly don’t think costs are the main issue behind that move. Most people with free accounts aren’t going to delete them even if they stop using the service or contributing new notes, so Evernote is still going to manage all these accounts. They aren’t likely to free up much server space either, it is very dependent on use case - a few notes with appliance user manuals attached are going to take up more space than several thousand plaintext notes, while still being under 50 note limit.

No, this is clearly done to force conversion to paid plans in order to improve revenue, even if this means giving up on growth for the time being.
 

3 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

If the relation of Free users vs. subscriptions is anything close to figures that were reported back in the past, a conversion rate of 10% of all Free users would double the number of subscribers. I think this could be called "being ahead on a revenue / ROI perspective" 😇

I honestly don't know if this is a realistic number, it has been reported that Evernote had 225-250 million users, 10% of that would be 22-25 million paid users. I don't think there's 22-25 million paying users today.

The price of Evernote in the US starts at $130 per year. In India, it seems to be around $10 per year. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that with all the plans and regions and legacy plans, an average global paying user brings at least $30 per year.

So, if Evernote had even 20 million paying users - less than 10% of reported user numbers - it would be bringing in around $600 million - that's over half a billion dollars in yearly revenue already.

But they were reported to bring in about $100 million in revenue. So I would guess perhaps 3-4 million paying users, globally.  In other words, if my educated guess is correct, only 1.5-2 percent of reported total  user numbers are paying for the service.

So forcing even 1% of existing free users to convert would be a big deal. 

We'll see how it goes.

Yes, no, maybe. It all depends on your use.

I have been using Onenote for work since at least 2010. I can't imagine Evernote or Notion or any other service being better for that specific use case. 

But that's because of these things:

• I primarily use it on the laptop. Only use my phone to look things up or jot a quick note, but not for major work.
• This means I can mainly use the Windows Desktop version with OneMore addin, which gives me extended functionality not available on mobile devices (or on Mac).
• It has great integration with Outlook and can pull in extended meeting information with a single click. Great for preparing for meetings, marking attendance, taking notes and sending them to everyone at the end. 
• I can create Outlook tasks from Onenote text, again with a single click. Great for making assignments in the meeting. 
• The tree-like organizational structure works great for project management, since projects tend to follow a defined structure. 

But none of this is really important for my personal notes. For these, I need a full featured phone client, and I prefer tags (because my personal notes are more like a bunch of lose records not following a rigid interconnected structure, and tags work better for this). So, while I successfully used Onenote for several years to keep personal notes, it's not the perfect solution (and honestly neither was Evernote, for me at least). 

They still advertise 100k limit on Free tier.

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005247-Evernote-system-limits

If any of the affected users are in the US, you may want to contact the FTC (both federal and state) & see if the Truth in Advertising laws have been broken here. AFAIK they apply to "free" offers (but not to political ads, LOL).

While FTC can't, of course, demand from any business to offer something for free, or set the usage limits on such offerings, they absolutely can force them to accurately disclose the limitations of such free offers. But it's their job to determine whether the advertising laws have been broken.

On 7/14/2023 at 8:10 AM, PinkElephant said:

The job of a CEO is to run the business to please the owners.

A CEO is not the Feelgood-Manager, even if occasionally he may come along as being it. If the owners decide to put lipstick on the elephant and cash in, it is his job to see the lipstick is nicely applied, and the elephant is looking good.

The compensation is part of that challenge. I would not be surprised if his contract had a "change of control" clause. At least I would have asked for it before taking over, giving the situation with a run down software base and more competition popping up.

The real main job of a CEO is to manage their career and personal wealth. There's a disproportionately high number of narcissistic sociopaths and bipolar people among the executives, which is just a process of natural selection. Same with politics.

Actually, BS has over a hundred million users. Evernote, at the time of acquisition, had over 250 million. So the user base of EN was 2.5 times larger already. 

Also, just because some BS users are purchasing their video and photo editing software and some their 30 Day Fitness app, gives them very little advantage when trying to sell a completely unrelated product that isn’t easily bundled with their other products to create a synergistic experience. I am subscribed to Hulu, good luck with them trying to sell me a lawn treatment plan.

2 hours ago, bmcl26 said:

I am on the Professional Plan, which is the second most expensive. Teams being the only plan that costs more, and even with the increase kicking in next year (I slipped in under the wire by 2 days as I only renewed on 28th May, two days before the increase for the existing subscribers kicked in and paid the same as last year £83.61p UK)  Even with the increase being applied next year this will only work out at an additional cost of less than £3 per month which bearing in mind the improvements over the last year in particular still make it excellent value.

2 hours ago, gazumped said:

So this works out at around $12 / month,  not $40??

I clearly haven't implied anywhere that the increases are $40, had I ?

It's just that here may well be enough deeply committed long term users that a $40/month or similar plan would not be that far fetched. After all, that's less than half the price of a Starbucks latte a day, and a whole number of users have no problem paying that.

My point is, there's basically several ways the company can grow the revenue and remain profitable and bring the new owners the return on their investment. 

a) Grow the number of paid users. I think it's obvious that that's not the direction they are taking.

b) Jack up the prices on existing users. Some will leave, many will remain, as long as the price increase ratio is higher than the user loss ratio, it's profitable. This is exactly what they seem to be doing.

c) Expand from consumer space into corporate space. They tried it. It didn't work out. Unless the new owners have a trick up their sleeve, it's not looking very promising.

d) Sell users' data. Not applicable here.

So, which way do you see them going ? They spend a lot of money, they need their ROI.