After making major staff cuts earlier this year, Bending Spoons, the Milan-based owner of Evernote, is now trialling a new plan that will prompt more users to upgrade to paid versions of its service. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that it is running a small test that sets limits on the number of notes users can create for free, but said the new plan has not yet been finalized.
TechCrunch was alerted to the test by an Evernote user who signed in to a pop-up message telling them that unless they upgraded to a paid plan, they would now be limited to just one notebook and 50 notes. This change would significantly limit service for longtime Evernote users who have collected hundreds or thousands of notes over the years.
Image credits: Evernote
Although messages are seen in the app itself, it’s the Evernote website Pricing plans page He didn’t indicate there was any such limit on free plans — which made the price hike seem like a hidden fee change that Evernote didn’t want to publicize. Instead, its website states that free users are only limited to things like 60MB monthly uploads or a 25MB note size limit. Other plans, including Personal and Professional, currently discounted to $10.83 per month and $14.17 per month, respectively, offer support for notes, larger uploads, and syncing with an unlimited number of devices, among other things.
Evernote said its website has not been updated with the new information because the change is not yet final. The company confirmed that it conducted a test with less than 1% of its free users to determine whether it would implement the new plan. A company representative explained that if this is the case, it will then communicate the changes via “relevant customer touchpoints.”
They also noted that the limit will not prevent free users from managing, editing, viewing, exporting or deleting their existing notes, even if they have more than the cap. It will only limit the user’s ability to create new notes, unless they become a paying customer.
However, this will be a radical change for long-time Evernote users who only use the app on one device for lightweight note-taking purposes. Effectively, this will force the majority of regular Evernote users on free plans to become paid users or simply stop using the app.
It is also likely that this change, if implemented, will drive more users to competing products e.g Microsoft One Noteany Starts at $6.99 per month With up to 1TB of cloud storage and sync up to 5 devices – better than Evernote’s personal plan. Or it may prompt users to experiment an ideaa collaborative note organizer that offers a free plan for individual users as well.
Evernote, which once was value Valued at nearly $1 billion, it had been struggling for years before it was acquired by Bending Spoons. The company lost top executives, including its CTO, CFO, CPO, and head of human resources in 2018, after CEO Phil Libin was replaced a few years ago by former Google CEO Chris O’Neill. Under Libin, Evernote has tried to expand into physical goods through partnerships with Moleskine, Pfeiffer and its own line of desk accessories. Later in 2018, Evernote laid off 15% of its workforce. CEO Ian Small then replaced O’Neill and the company was able to generate $100 million in recurring revenue. Unfortunately, the app was still unable to keep up with new competitors like Notion in the lead-up to its exit.
Bending spoons, which owns the video editor Splice, photo editor Remini and other apps, announced its acquisition of Evernote in late 2022 and then immediately laid off 129 employees. Explaining the decision, a company spokesperson at the time said the company had “not been profitable for years” and “the situation was unsustainable in the long term.”
This may also apply to Evernote’s ability to offer a free plan, should these new changes be implemented.