Evernote has a long legacy of being one of the pioneers of digital notetaking apps and is still the go-to choice of millions of users. Even after all these years, the app manages to keep up with its competition with new features and occasional experiments. But Evernote’s latest test may not go down well with long-time users as the company wants to fundamentally change how your free account works with new usage restrictions that are bound to irk many users.
The folks atTechCrunchlearned through their tipster that Evernote is currently running a test that restricts free accounts to 1 notebook and 50 notes. The user spotted this in a pop-up message (below) when they opened the app detailing these changes. Evernote offered the user to upgrade their account to the paid tier for $78 a year to get unlimited notes. Evernote confirmed that it is indeed running this experiment with a limited set of users, affecting less than 1% of its base.
With this restriction in place, you won’t be able to create new notes unless you pay the fee in case you’ve already exhausted the 50-note quota. However, it will let you manage and edit your existing notes even if you already have hundreds of notes saved. Considering most other notetaking apps don’t put such limits even on their free users, this 50-note quota feels quite limiting, especially for those who’ve stuck with Evernote for years.
The pricing page on Evernote’s website still doesn’t show these changes since they aren’t final just yet. The potential ill effects of pushing the users to pay for features that have always been free could hopefully make the company rethink its decision. So, if enough Evernote users object, there is a solid chance that the companymaydecide not to roll this out further.
Evernote was acquired by Bending Spoons a little over a year ago, and the new owner appears determined to turn the app profitable. Earlier this year,it laid off 129 Evernote employeesas a cost-cutting measure. And this latest move is in line with Bending Spoons’ larger monetization plan for the app. In the meantime, Evernote has been adding new features likeit caught up to Notion with note backlinksto let you quickly jump between your saved notes.
But these rather slow feature rollouts and new restrictions aren’t doing Evernote’s perception any favor. There areplenty of fantastic notetaking apps for Androidthat you can go for instead, ranging from simple ones likeGoogle Keep, whichgot rich text formatting recently, to more advanced tools like OneNote, which is a part of the Microsoft 365 subscription that costs less and delivers much more value. If Evernote has been giving you too much trouble, this might be the time to jump ships.
