Wanderling Reborn

Reading the replies, there's quite a few people who would probably justify that, since no other note service is a direct clone of Evernote.

On 7/6/2023 at 6:36 PM, richtpt said:

Let me say this a little different about the price increase.  If I were just starting out with the free account then decided I like it enough to pay for it, I doubt I would pay $129.99/yr, I would look for other solutions.  Right now, I've got a TON of notes in there, back to 2009!  EN is obviously valuable to me, so it's almost easier to just say whatever and pay the new amount.  I don't think EN is thinking of new customers with a price like this.  Someone else mentioned OneNote and for $99/yr you get five users for the MS Office Suite, which includes OneNote.  It's a great deal, I have it for my family.  NoteJoy is another really good alternative.  They have four levels, free, $4/month, $8 & $12 (that's $48/yr, $96 & $144).  $4 gives me 5GB of storage, $8 gives me 10GB, and $12 gives me 20GB.  I'm honestly thinking of switching to them and would start with the $4/mo plan.  If 5GB isn't enough, I'll upgrade.

But as I said, if I were a new customer, I doubt I'd pay $129.99/yr for the way I use EN, as simply an online notebook.  

I've made this point before... Evernote seems to have given up on attracting new paying users, and instead started concentrating on improving their revenue stream from the existing paying users who are deeply entrenched into its ecosystem. That already started happening before the new owners took it over, and they now seem to be making deliberate steps in the direction of rent-seeking. If they double the price and lose three quarters of free users and a quarter of paying users, they are still well ahead financially.

So yes, a new customer will likely not pay $130 per year, which is just over $10 per month. But a long term, deeply invested customer will easily justify paying $35-40 per month, because after all, a lunch a day costs more, cell phone service costs as much or more, internet costs more, and if they have tens of thousands of records in Evernote and built their entire daily routine around it, that service is on the same level of importance in their life. Heck, how many people you know who are buying a Starbucks latte every workday ? That's over $800 per year, if you do simple math. Evernote is still a whole lot cheaper.

So, unless the BS have a strategy to successfully grow the service - which the original company was rather unable to do - they still have a cash cow that can be successively milked for a couple decades, barring some major market disruption.

7 hours ago, notetakeingguy said:

And that's what will make it hard for me to switch from Evernote. I have 15,000 notes, all tagged very well, and very easy to find. I don't have an easy way to recreate that somewhere else.

And that’s why legacy users like you are going to ensure a steady revenue flow for years to come, even if the number of new paying users is drastically shrinking.

Realistically they could probably charge $50 per month and still retain the majority of deeply invested legacy customers. After all, many people spend more on Starbucks…

4 hours ago, notetakeingguy said:

Is there any equivalent to tags in OneNote? Namely, where one can assign multiple tags, which I use a lot.

 

And remember, Evernote isn't gone, just all the staff. I have never been fond of how Evernote interacted with customers; creating features that worked partially, never fixing things, and ignoring customer feedback. Perhaps that will get resolved?

Not quite the same way - i.e. you won't get a tree of tags which you can pick from. 

Onenote "tags" can be used that way, but this would really take away from their intended use which is to tag lines of text, not entire notes.

What I am using to tag whole notes is plaintext tags - something like "tgRef", "tgABC" etc. Then I can search for this text and find what I need. If I use a combination of tags the top results are the notes that have all of the tags.

So, I can search for my plaintext tags and find notes that are tagged with them. Or I can search for Onenote tags and find lines of text across different notes that contain them. This feature works the best with Onenote for Windows, but it's also available in Mac (just not as full featured). 

That said, I still use Onenote for work notes (the integration with Outlook and Teams is very good), and my wife is using Evernote for her notes (which she expects me to maintain and organize). But, I am not using Onenote or Evernote for my personal notes anymore, a few years ago I moved all long term (permanent) notes to file system, and as of recently am using Apple Notes for short term ones. I can still easily find what I need by using Spotlight search on Mac or Windows indexing, and there's no more worries about exporting or backing up or moving systems. 

3 hours ago, notetakeingguy said:

I use OneNote for work and where it is lacking is searching is not as easy/effective, it can't search inside documents, and tagging is really not intuitive. Tagging and searching are the two biggest things I do in Evernote, hence why it doesn't work for me.

 

Back to the original topic of this thread, I just looked at the Linkedin of the former CEO of Evernote, and this may have been the plan:

He likely got a nice golden parachute, but also, to his credit, given where Evernote was.

It can search in documents if you insert them as a printout. But it's still not as useful as Evernote search.

And what OneNote calls "tagging" is not the same concept at all, which is why it feels so unintuitive for someone who is used to Evernote style tags. It's a very powerful feature but has nothing to do with finding individual notes, which is what the "traditional" tags are for.  I wish they used a different term to call it, would avoid lots of confusion.

The tags in a classic, Evernote anpproach are to classify notes individual notes ("Cars", "cats" etc). The "tags" in OneNote are to mark individual lines of text (paragraphs, phrases whatever) across the notes. I.e. Evernote tags let me find all notes related to cars. OneNote "tags" let me find todos (or  important bits of info, or things I want to check out later, or deadlines assigned in a meeting) across all my notes regardless of what category the notes belong to.

In my experience, Evernote is better when dealing with basically a large pile of random notes, that can be loosely categorized. Onenote is better for project management, when you have a fairly structured record organization and need to pinpoint specific kinds of information  scattered across your meeting minutes and emails. 

On 6/10/2023 at 1:12 PM, estevancarlos said:

I misspoke. I don't mean Evernote's subscription model is a problem. I'm referring to their dramatic change in pricing model. With Waves Audio, going from a one-time fee a to subscription was a problem for many. In my opinion, I would expect an 80% increase in price from Evernote to be equally disappointing.

Evernote has been in somewhat of a disarray for 7-8 years now. A lot of users left in that time. The remaining paid users are a committed bunch, and still many have been leaving lately.

If there's 100,000 paid users who are so deeply entrenched in Evernote that they will pay e.g. $40 per month for it, which still "costs less than three lattes a week", they would  be bringing in more money than 600,000 users paying $6 a month. If the company gave up on expanding their user base, and is sitting on a large hoard of user data that is not easily moved elsewhere, rent-seeking starts to look very promising. The users who agree to pay that much aren't going to complain, and those who complain aren't going to pay anyway.

And how many people do you know that are buying a Starbucks latte at least once a day, every day, without a second thought ? A Grande will run you over $5 with tax and tips. Evernote is still rather cheap by comparison.

On 6/12/2023 at 1:21 PM, Randy Zeitman said:

You're going to leave the platform because you got charged $15 instead of $3 each year for five years -- and your complaint is that $15 instead of 'next couple of months' is a bad deal?

"They've got people like me over a barrel, and they know it, it's just bad business to make it clear that they could care less about their customers."

Over a barrel. 

I really would like to know how much you think it cost to acquire EN and take this app to this new strata.

The cost of acquiring EN is largely irrelevant in the pricing structure. There's a relationship between what they can charge,  and the number of paying customers that they can retain (existing) and attract (new). The acquisition price would be driven by the business case developed when they were planning the acquisition, not the other way around.

As to the new strata - time will show whether they intent (and are capable of) taking the service to the new heights that would put it above the competition and attract new customers, or if they intent to engage in a rent-seeking behavior, slowly squeezing those existing customers who are deeply committed to their data accumulated over many years

On 5/20/2023 at 11:28 AM, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Said it before, perhaps bears repeating: can you point to a price increase since 2017? What squeezing? When and whom? Keep saying it, but don't expect it to be accepted without evidence.

Here you go. It's actually 2016, I was off by a year.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/28/12052056/evernote-price-changes-basic-plus-premium

Then there was this  in 2021

https://evernote.com/blog/new-features-plans-for-personal-professional-productivity/

I believe some features were bumped into higher priced plans, or did they just freeze legacy plans pricing and features ? I wasn't a paid subscriber by then so not sure if that's when it happened. 

19 hours ago, CalS said:

I'm not sure the 100's of millions of expressed EN users makes a lot of difference.  More interesting stats would be the actual number of EN users on a monthly basis and the number of those that subscribe.  How many websites do folks go to, sign up, and never return?  I've done it more than once.  For EN I have five Basic accounts.  Four that were always basic for test and backup, and one that was subscription pre V10.  Though these counts may have naught to do with pricing..

I think that there is merit to an argument that the barrier for new entry has been raised with these price increases.  There are some 3 digit subscriptions but not many best I can tell.  So such a thing may cause a pause for new users.  As costly as it may be for an entrenched user to move on it may feel as costly for a new user to sign up.  To some extent I think hard core EN users are a niche market.  How BS adds users in that niche market with three digit pricing will be interesting.  End of the day, their business so they will do as they like.  Feels a bit like a cash cow with these moves.  🤷‍♂️

 

Actually the price impacts potential new users disproportionately more. The established users already like the service, are already strongly entrenched into it, they just have to decide whether the benefits of continuing to use the service outweigh the new price. The majority of potential users probably won't even consider a service that is so much more expensive than competition unless they are immediately wowed by its features. And they are going to be overwhelmed by all of the choices too much to see the finer points, this takes experience. And experience comes after extended use. And the new price + limitations of free tier make it much harder for the new potential customers to commit to extended use. For most people it's more like "installed, played around, ran into free tier limits, looked at the price, uninstalled, tried another service" cycle.

I've been saying this since about 2017.... Evernote seems interested in squeezing the existing users not in attracting the new ones. This is not a recipe for growth or even continuing longterm existence.

I’ve had enough services and products that I relied on going belly up over the years (or changing their business model in a drastic and disruptive way) to long ago start thinkIng hard about the company’s long term health and business direction before committing. Evernote is fine as long as you have a sound exit strategy, however at the end of the day Bending Spoon wants to make a return on their investment, and I don’t see any indication of them trying to grow that product - so how do you think they will make up all that money and get the cherry on top?

18 minutes ago, gazumped said:

The new prices for Evernote Professional (I may have mentioned before) equate to a cup of coffee per week in the UK.  If you don't feel that's a reasonable charge,  then you're quite right to leave.  Evernote's new owners (I understand) have a user base that's possibly larger than Evernote ever was,  and I also believe they alrady pay similar subscriptions for different services.  I think the company will survive.

It doesn't matter how the new prices convert into coffee, or cheese, or gas.

What matters is how competitive the pricing is, and how many users it's likely to attract vs turning away.

At this price point, I fail to see how they are going to attract many new users who are not already deeply entrenched into Evernote-specific workflow. Coffee or not, Evernote is too expensive compared to most other options in the same field.

And their business expansion strategy announced about 6 years ago (iirc) hasn't produced any known major results.

So, how do they get to grow their revenue if they don't attract a large number of new customers, don't expand into business enterprise space, and don't make a major strategy change (e.g. get into datamining) ?

Well, they do have a large number of captive users who have years of their lives in Evernote, and for whom the effort and the stress of switching to another service would be prohibitively high. And they have been jacking up the prices for a few years now, especially since the new owners took over. This is consistent with what could be termed "rent-seeking". 

4 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Yep.  It could be called "businesslike" or "professional" or "responsible".  You try costing an app that services almost as many users as there are adults in the US on a 365/24/7 basis.

How many of them are willing to pay the new prices ?

The number of customers is a pointless statistic unless they are paying (or otherwise monetized) customers. 

“This service failed to convert free users into paying ones so we are jacking up the prices because we have a large enough captive entrenched customer base to last us another decade” is business like, just not a good recipe for a sustained operation.

On 5/4/2023 at 5:24 PM, PinkElephant said:

Sorry for what follows now, and maybe I got burned by 30+ years in corporate IT slavery, being forced to use the products out of Redmond:

Who is using OneNote voluntarily deserves it !

Onenote is perfectly fine. It's not Evernote, nor is it supposed to be. It has its own strong points and its own weaknesses, just like Evernote. It has its uses, just like Evernote. Onenote is perfect for work projects because of its organized structure, its tags (nothing like Evernote tags, a very different concept) and its integration with Outlook / Teams / Office. As a project manager, I find Onenote indispensable. I can quickly pull all meeting info into a Onenote page, already complete with participant names, mark attendance, take notes while assigning action tags on the fly (tagging lines of text as  "Todo", "Scope change", "Deadline", "Info to remember", "Followup", "Assigned to XYZ" etc. with just a quick keystroke), insert screenshots and mark them up, attach files and voice recordings, create Outlook tasks, and send the meeting notes out to participants without leaving Onenote. 

On the other hand, it's a bit too structured for personal information.

This is not a Onenote vs Evernote argument. Both services have pros and cons and dedicated users and the very premise of this argument is silly.

The question is, can Evernote survive at these subscription prices.

I have maintained long ago - about six years back - that their new business model seems to be squeezing as much money out of existing, dedicated, entrenched users as possible, instead of growing the service. 

The new owners seem to be taking this approach to a whole new level.

2010 - 2011-ish. With lapses, oscillating between paid and free plans, and different accounts.

I’ve been on EN long enough that at some point I’ve moved hundreds of notes to a new kid on the block, Springboard (remember them ?)

Now, however, all of my notes reside in a mix of Onenote and individual files saved in an indexed location on my hard drive. I do help my wife with maintaining her Evernote data, she likes dumping all kinds of info into it but I am the one responsible for organizing it so she can find it later.

On 3/7/2023 at 3:42 AM, Sayre Ambrosio said:

If you are on Mac it doesn't. OneNote is missing features on the actual app and they did away with the Safari web clipper years ago with promises to bring it back and never did. I brought over a lot of educational people then and now I'll have to move them back out to something else, which honestly will probably be notion because they have a great education plan.

As an Expert I'm hanging around to see what plays out, but I have already started looking for an alternative for my personal use.

FYI, the trick for clipping to Onenote on Mac is to use Share then Email this Page (I use Outlook as my email client). Send to me@onenote, you should get a whole page clip with the link to the original page. I actually like it better than the original web clip client. 

Again, a word of caution...

Joplin's database is not protected on desktop. Only in transit and on mobile devices. The user is expected to provide their own desktop encryption solution, either as a whole disk encryption or storing Joplin database in an encrypted container.

Also, Joplin used to keep the encryption password in plain text on the desktop. Their excuse was, again, that the user is responsible for protecting the desktop and all of its data. They eventually fixed this on Windows, thanks to the user community outcry, but I don't know if they ever fixed it on Linux. This doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy about their whole approach to security.

I am not dumping on Joplin, it's an interesting project, but I realized it's not for me, for these and some other reasons.

If you only plan on only storing your data locally, then (depending on your OS) you may be better off just keeping it in file folder structure. On MacOS, the combination of Spotlight indexing search and file tagging makes finding the right record a breeze. I just recently switched to a Mac from a lifetime of Windows and Linux, and it's so much easier to quickly locate a record.

A word of caution about Joplin: if you use any attachments, it may not be for you. 
When you insert an attachment into a Joplin note, it permanently renames the file with some random ID sequence. So if later you decide that Joplin is not for you, any meaningful attachment file names will be lost.

2 hours ago, gazumped said:

Not quite all - they developed a Covid app for free for the Italian government.  None of the other apps strike me as note-taking related,  but your opinion is as good as mine on this - we'll just have to agree to disagree!

So not that wildly overpriced then?

It depends on (1) what you are paying and (2) what you're paying it for.

Evernote is $8.99 per month so about $108 per year; you get a single service with unlimited storage for whatever you put in this service. (But 10 Gb monthly upload limit).

O365 is $99 per year, or $50 if you qualify for Home Use Program (which would cover pretty much anyone who works for a company which is on one of business O365 plans, at least I qualified at 2 different companies).  You get 1 TB of Onedrive space that can be used by any app, Excel, Word, Outlook, Powerpoint and Onenote that can be installed on (I think) up to 5 computers with same MS email (and mobile devices don't count toward this limit). 

So, for some people, Evernote is well priced. For others, it's overpriced compared to O365. 

1 hour ago, DTLow said:

Would this apply if Evernote continues to be a separate US entity?

Honestly I have no idea. If Evernote is a separate US entity, but EU requires that any data held by EU citizens is subject to EU laws, I believe a fairly common approach is to split the servers and keep US customers data in the US and EU customers data in the EU. And it's further complicated if the top level owner is an EU based corporation, as if there's no corresponding US law that clearly proscribes what needs to be done with US customers' or international (non-US and non-EU) customers' data, they are more likely to err on the side of EU law. But  I am not an expert in the international law governing data handling.

On 11/17/2022 at 12:25 PM, Dave-in-Decatur said:

There really wasn't any hint of that in the announcement. It seems to me that a company wouldn't buy another company if they thought they'd have to rebuild everything right away. Unless, of course, they like doing that sort of thing....

That's a really good question. I've never had any doubts about Evernote's privacy and security. But storing the data under stricter European conditions could only be good.

Not sure I agree. The stricter EU conditions also come with heavy handed and borderline intrusive EU governmental demands.

EU’s resolution on encryption foreshadows likely anti-encryption push | Proton

Statewatch | EU: Anti-encryption Regulation: Presidency compromise proposals for Chapter I and Chapter III

Rights activists slam EU plan for access to encrypted chats | AP News

Wait and see, everything is just speculations now.

On 10/4/2022 at 3:57 PM, kubda said:

.This is just gets worse for me. I am losing a lot of data every time I use evernote. @PinkElephant, the help link you’ve listed above doesn’t work for me. I can’t keep rebooting and reinstalling anyhow. I can copy and past into another location but that really means I copy and paste everything … currently into Notion. Am. I missing something? When I’ve been working on something for some time, copying it all back and forth, seems also unreliable. I will make a mistake at some point. Evernote, used to love you, can’t take it anymore. I am looking at Notion and Joplin as a total replacement.

Notion is strictly online. There's no offline mode. This alone makes it not great for my use.

Joplin is like an old British sports car - ugly, really not all that fast, the steering wheel is on the wrong side, yet somehow it's special. It's biggest issues from my perspective are (1) no OCR of PDF or images (2) limited iOS app functionality (3) over reliance on plugins to gain some great functionality - this means that much of that functionality is not available in mobile versions since they don't support plugins, and you're trusting a whole bunch of random strangers with your data (a common problem with almost all FOSS projects). That said, the more I dive into its ecosystem, the more I like it. 

On 4/17/2021 at 9:01 PM, Paul A. said:

I use Microsoft To Do for tasks, and it's not a view I use but I just checked and I seem to be able to sort in due date order on the To Do desktop app for Mac. Go to "All" on the left bar, then click the three dots menu in the top-right, then sort > Due Date.

You can sort in Due Date order in lists. I am talking about search results and especially tags.

E.g. let's say I use a tag #Deadline to track my milestones and major deadlines across all projects. I can click on that tag in any task, and ToDo will show me a list of all tasks that have this tag. Perfect, right ?

Except that this list is not sorted by due date. I don't know exactly what it is sorted by - it may be the task creation date. But it's certainly not the current due date. So I have deadlines in May shown above deadlines in April, dates all over the place. It's the same when you search for something. This makes the tag / search feature nearly useless.

12 hours ago, itoldusoandso said:

Right.  So all platforms except iOS are fine, there are options.   

Thanks Tomball for responding and particular @aukirk tip solves the issue for me. Most of searching happens on iPad for me anyways.

Still, I believe, Evernote should have included the shortcut somewhere. There are plenty of shortcuts which would great if I could type quick Boolean expression on ad-hoc basis whenever I want ... without need to give Evenote come coursing words. 

These are perhaps areas Evenore should have invested instead of plenty of tchotchkes over the years. 

 

iOS works the same as MacOS. You can preset keyboard shortcuts to type your most commonly used phrases with a few  unique characters.
 

e.g. if  I type "ppq" on my iPhone I get this:

Please contact me with any questions or comments. 

I make extensive use of AutoHotKey on Windows, keyboard shortcuts in iOS, and AutoKey on Linux to speed up typing often used phrases. E.g. type “qii” and get “Intitle”. I am sure something like that exists for Android too. No reason to program this into the service itself.

14 hours ago, Tonymynd said:

It hurts a little bit to do this, but I'm moving to MS To-Do. I purchased a license for MS 365 and will take advantage of that. I really sorry to do this, I love you all, but I got love myself also. It been horribly difficult to run my business with all the new bugs, major changes and specially the speed reduction is  a big deal for me, specially for my GTD system. I would be checking to see how you guys improve, maybe we can reconcile in the future, and I will purchased the premium again. Wishing you all the best... Jose Antonio Garciarivas, from Toluca, Mexico.

A big flaw in MS Todo is the search /tag filter results. They are not, and can not be arranged in Due date order. This makes it impractical for a large number of tasks.