Evernote Review

The software underneath is still good, which is what makes this one painful to write. Capture is fast, the web clipper remains the best there has ever been, search reads text inside photographs and scanned PDFs, and a decade of notes stays findable in a way newer tools have not matched. People built working lives on it for a reason, and the reason holds.

Then the new owner arrived. Bending Spoons bought the company in late 2022, closed the deal that January, cut around two hundred and fifty staff, and reset the business model instead of the product. The free tier fell to fifty notes in a single notebook with a small monthly upload allowance and sync to one device plus the web, which is not a free plan, it is a countdown. Renewal notices went out with the annual personal plan jumping from roughly seventy dollars to a hundred and thirty, and the ladder was rebuilt again into a starter plan at ninety nine dollars a year and an advanced plan at nearly two hundred and fifty.

Support became hard to reach at exactly the moment customers needed to argue about a charge. Meanwhile the features that were supposed to justify the new prices arrived thinly or not at all. Long time users left for products that cost less and ship more, and the churn teardowns written about it are the harshest in consumer software. A capable app, priced by an owner who has decided the people left cannot go anywhere.