Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
Its acquirer (Bending Spoons) has taken over operations. They’ve also hiked subscriptions prices and told customers they intend to use new revenues to pay for new features. How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about.
If you’re still using Evernote, probably a good time to stop.
867 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 474 ms ] threadThe git plugin is dangerously broken. I've had pushes from different computers overwrite one another. It doesn't show merge conflicts - it's happy to plow forward. I've reduced my usage since that happened. This is a huge problem. I need to have confidence the backups and merges aren't destroying notes.
There's no easy way to open multiple workspaces simultaneously. I want to start using Obsidian for work, but I'm not going to share or subset my private notebook. If I want to switch to the team workspace, I have to close my personal workspace. Only one can be open at a time, and that's awkward.
If these two problems get fixed, Obsidian will become my end-all, be-all organizational software.
I will pay a lot of money ($100/mo!) for this to work right.
(Final minor nit: I'd like to include multimedia, but use Git LFS or another cloud storage system. I don't want them in git.)
Maybe a little bit of Macguyvering to add backups is a good idea
I've done this and it seems to work fine.
In theory I guess you could end up with sync conflicts if you are literally editing the same note on two devices at the same time, in which case Dropbox will create a "Conflicted Copy" which will pop up in Obsidian so you can resolve it manually.
But in practice, because Obsidian saves pretty much constantly, and Dropbox syncs pretty much constantly, in a typical connected office use case you don't run into this much. If you work offline a lot, you might need to think about a more structured workflow (i.e. using Git). But for me it wasn't worth the hassle to commit/push every time I wanted to switch devices. Dropbox (and presumably the many Dropbox-like folder-sync tools) worked fine when I was testing it out.
If you want multiple workspaces, you can create a separate vault that is backed by a different private github repo.
I've been using Obsidian Sync for a year, and it works flawlessly for my use case. Is syncs not only notes, but also configuration, plugins, allows creation of multiple vaults, works on mobile, fine-grained control over which folders to sync in each device, and even allow controlled sharing with collaborators. Oh, and full encryption with user-provided key, which is a must. All for $96/year.
[1] https://obsidian.md/sync
When the price comes down to $3/month, I'll start paying for it. Until then, I'll use Syncthing for free.
I used evernote a long while ago.
How can i bridge the divide between all devices between those too ? In a way that is cross-device and helps with notes/tags etc ?
I suspect you are keeping a specific folder of random files as your note taking location ?
What Sync does is not only "sync", it also helps Obsidian remain profitable and 100% user supported. Subsidizing costs in pursuit of growth is what got Evernote here.
100x this.
More than paying for a feature, subscribing to Obsidian Sync is a great way of sponsoring the project, and hoping that these folks are successfully enough to make a living and continue to pay their talented engineers for as long as possible, without going down the rabbit hole of VC funding and stock market.
What do you mean by using git lfs but not wanting files in git? Generally you should be able to use git lfs with any note app that supports git as long as you are able to enable lfs on whatever server you are using and are able to edit .gitattributes. It's just git with a bit of logic to only download the needed revisions of binary files instead of the whole history. But as far as I can reason, there's no practical difference if you're not often editing the binary files which you add because there's usually only one copy/no patches for the binary files.
Hardware gets better so UI gets more glittery, everyone tries to "stand out" by looking/working best, so the UI "taste" changes. Or hardware form factor changes, so everything needs re-written to support it, etc.
Next hardware re-write will be some mix of AI/low power. None of the "green" energy stuff will deliver in time, nuclear won't happen in a way that is both safe and any-time-soon, and meanwhile power-hungry AIs will be battling for cpu cycles and watts with other devices.
Your devices will be very low power and the majority of modern software will be laughably ill-equipped to handle that. Or it will run on giant mainframes that look nothing like x86 desktops or even server farms, more like specialized super computers.
Their 'new' client software (Electron-based, of course) never even achieved feature parity with their 'legacy' client software. The mobile app wasn't exactly screamingly performant, to put it nicely. Really basic core use cases, like creating a note, typing in a title and some content, tagging it with a keyword, and saving it, required a lot more clicks than it seemed to me like it should. Hierarchical tags, while technically supported, seemed like a weird add-on that never got full support. And Penultimate -- their tablet-centric app that stored data in your Evernote account -- hasn't been updated in several years; I'm actually impressed it continues to work.
There's plenty of room where they could have built new features, if they'd wanted to. Off the top of my head, I'd have liked to see Markdown support instead of their quasi-HTML WYSIWYG editor (some versions of the thick client had a subset of Markdown-like syntax but others didn't). Penultimate would have been great if it had on-device OCR / handwriting recognition, or even just a way of tagging specific pages or page-regions with keywords.
I think there's a lot of room in the notetaking space. I'm still waiting for an app that isn't a glorified text editor or a drawing program, but also doesn't lock your data into some unparsable binary format or obscure graph database behind the scenes. I want to take notes, using a pen, on a tablet, that might or might not be text, and then I want to annotate the shit out of those notes and keyword them and cross-reference them, and I want the whole thing to be searchable and I want the handwriting recognition to not suck, and I want all of this to be encrypted at rest and in transit, and I want native clients for all major desktop and mobile operating systems.
So, yeah, I don't think notetaking is done quite yet.
And the limited depth of notebooks has always been just wrong, which is why I use hierarchical tags.
Not if you ask product managers
I think the tension between having a good web app and a good desktop app with the same interface is difficult to resolve.
The syncing with Sharepoint also works pretty crap. I preferred when the database was just stored locally and I could choose where to store it.
I'd love to get a new application just like this that works like the old OneNote. Without a whole cloud backing it which locks in my information (e.g. Evernote, Notion etc). Just a file (or collection of files) I can store locally or even in a local git server or whatever. But with options for attachments and cross platform.
I haven't really found anything good. Most of the things are not WYSIWYG but markdown with a double pane (one for the input and one for rendered) which I don't like - I'm not a dev so I don't really idolise markdown or have the muscle memory for it.
I still manage to save my modern OneNote files locally. I save them to my Dropbox for syncing.
And I don't just use windows these days so it's not really an option for me.
https://longnow.org/ideas/evernote-and-the-100-year-data-gua...
That almost sounds like a threat to commit a crime in certain jurisdictions. A lot has changed regarding how we talk about data in the last decade.
For one, you can typically opt out of the latter, but not the former.
>All my university systems run on Microsoft. All my future employers' systems will probably run on Microsoft. All public transport in my country effectively requires an app which is tied to either Google or Apple operating systems to buy tickets. Schools require students as young as 6 years old to have an iPad or chromebook tied to Google or Apple.
>There is no real choice in our modern society to "not give your personal data" to these megacorps.
You'd have to be homeless, unemployed, unbanked and practically a hermit to even approach "opting out" from this private law. That's not a real choice.
How many people have gmail addresses? Use Google products, such as Google's VOIP service? How many cars, or home(now) come with such products built in?
I guess what I'm getting at is, even if you do your best to purge yourself, and even if you try to purge the government, you're still left dealing with people, and if you email them at gmail, then Google still gets the entire conversation.
And if we somehow manage to create at "Don't store this" situation, will it be like when the Canadian government passed a law, forcing Google, Facebook, etc to pay for linking to stories? Just as Australia did?
They're effectively dropped all Canadian news sources.
So, would they "drop" users who have requested no data storage? That is, you cannot email anyone at gmail? It goes into a dead hole?
I suspect that freemium, as a business model, is going to be completely incompatible with democracy.
What would make it an ex post facto law is if companies were punished for how they handled data before the law was created. It is perfectly reasonable to punish them if they continue that same behavior after the law was created.
Some poor kid would have to go and load all the tapes and redact it.
Also, it is morally different when you want to punish lawmakers.
It is voluntarily ridiculously extreme, because the parent comment was itself ridiculously categorical.
The thing is: most of the time, retro-active laws are dangerous tools that should be used rarely and with caution, but sometimes and when some people have been doing something that they knew was evil even though not technically illegal, it can make sense to punish them with laws designed after the fact.
Especially evident in programming. E.g. "premature optimization is the root of all evil".
Knuth said: "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."
Still, the problem remains; i.e. a new law is likely to require you to remove some content that you’ve been serving or to change the way you’re handling the content.
Unless the guarantee was for Evernote to hold this data for 100 years irrespective of what the customer wishes and for example after the customer has ended their contract for the service, this angle doesn't apply.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2012/06/21/tech/web/internet-data-everno...
It’s (or was) the promise for you to be able to access your data for so long, provided you agree. Not hoarding private data against your will.
1. if you want your data removed, companies HAVE to remove your data
2. if you don't want your data stored, companies CANNOT store your data
and then a bunch of if-when-then-else-must-cannot-time-dependent-legal-stuff
This sounds mostly like a PR stunt to use the word "legally" to try to instill a false sense of confidence in users when in reality, "legally" doesn't mean much. Legally binding to what? The corporation? The corporation can run out of funds and die in 2 years, and then the contract isn't bound to anything.
Legally binding for 100 years has NOTHING to do with staying alive for 100 years.
> Ted Nelson, Customer : But why do they put a guarantee on the box?
>Tommy : Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product from me
If you ain’t got the cash, your words don’t matter
Well, I'm off enjoying the last few weeks of my lifetime HBO cheap subscription.
Marco Arment has occasionally complained about lifetime, one-time Overcast premium subscriptions and how he’d really like to rug pull those. But, to his credit, has no present plans to do so. However, it’s more because he doesn’t want to deal with the backlash, rather than because the right thing to do is honor “lifetime.”
Yeah, it's that. He mentioned once that Apple had a rule where you can't remove functionality bought through in-app purchases, probably around the same time he was lamenting one-time subscriptions. He definitely would pull the rug (to use the phrase) if he could, and I wonder if he limits adding features to Overcast because of it.
I wonder when did such a bold guarantee work in practice?
There was a time when iCloud wasn't reliable. When that improved, Notes became a simpler free alternative.
However, it's "good enough" for most people, and free.
One of the greatest bag fumbles in SV history imo.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793
https://itunes.apple.com/app/exporter/id1099120373?l=en%26mt...
I still have a few Evernote-branded Moleskine notebooks lying around. They came with a 3 month voucher for Evernote Premium, I think. Anyway, heavily discounted on Amazon, it was almost cheaper to combine the notebooks with vouchers than to subscribe online.
And then you had all the different apps, like a recipe app. My God, all the apps. Complete waste of resources, complete lack of focus.
When the VC money dried up, the penny dropped. Prices were hiked, new subscription tiers with artificial limitations were introduced, management changed, but by then the writing was on the wall and I switched to alternatives.
Being one of the first 1000 Premium users, I still feel bad about the loss of my second/forever brain, though.
And an Evernote branded physical note has to be some kind of ironical statement. I'd hang on to that as a memento.
Contractors from cheaper cost of living countries, I expect.
I guess that's one way to reduce customer churn.
For anyone not jumping ship, you can reduce your price hike to only 78-ish total per year by clicking through the cancelation menus.
I am so sick of this reality. Endless dark patterns to get your money. Nearly impossible to get out. Why ever make a good product when you can just seek rent and fall into that perfect optimum of cheap-enough that cancelling is not worth the pain.
A site that remains persistently broken has a lot more wrong with it than just some software bugs.
So in this case, yes, there is a lot more wrong.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's so common with paid software offerings that it's no longer a red flag for me; I just assume that blocking issues that can be presented as only affecting a small number of users will not be addressed, especially if they're considered temporary issues. AWS and Azure certainly aren't paying out a ton when they have outages or system errors that for all intents and purposes render the services offered or machines running on their infrastructure whenever they have issues.†
For me it's hard to escape the conclusion that many services are over-subscribing their Systems and Developer staff across too many things presented as a single service; identity management, compute services, storage services, payment processing, free tiers, and so much more under a single service. A systems error or login problem or the classic Google problem of a single flagged account irradiating everything it touches on the platform is all it takes to completely take down your operations.
And the SLAs/TOS/EULA are quite complex on these platforms; it's hard for me to think that most persons can truly understand what they are agreeing to when signing up for these platforms, including the companies offering the platforms; in my own experience dealing with Storage-aaS vendors who provide S3 storage, it's very hard to get straight answers on outages or massive 5xx situations. (Embarrassingly, said Storage-aaS vendors' support teams have said in no ambiguous way that a 5xx error responses is a _client side error_ that needs to be investigated by the maintainer of the client accessing the S3 services...and I maintain it's incorrect for said vendors to use 503/500 as a response for "please slow down" when we have the 504 "Slow Down" response with S3, or the classic 429 HTTP response could be served instead, both of which are actionable for client applications)
The services are too big and doing too much, and not always very well. And ignoring the "small" interruptions that basically prevent the users of the platforms from doing their work is the norm; if the issue doesn't hit at least double-digit percentages of users, my experience is that the platforms do not budge or move since it can be hand waved away. And the user recourse in such situations is basically non-existent; maybe you'll get some credit, maybe you won't, who knows? The platforms sure don't, despite the monstrous EULAs they ask you to agree to.
I don't know what the answer is, but I really cannot consider many of the platforms, regardless of whether its for work or personal social purposes, as reliable. If a platform is going to present itself as a backbone of modern internet/computing, it's really trying to claim it's a utility, but it doesn't want to behave like a utility, it wants to get more spending from the users; as long as this is the case, where the user capture efforts take higher priority than maintaining the services and using plausibly deniable tactics to eschew that responsibility, I cannot get excited or interested in platforms; I will use them as the projects I work on require the platforms, but if it were up to me, I'd not put everything on platforms and diversify as much as possible.
† You can [0] submit a request for credit, but I'm not sure how much credit is being issued this way; I will give AWS a small nod to the fact that at least for me, their SLA Guarantee page is "fairly" easy to read, but my issue is that it looks like they only will o...
At almost every step, the system sort of nags you with "Do you REALLY want to do this?" almost with a trolling attitude!
If this is the case with proper big tech capitalist, think what will the scenario be with smaller pleb capitalists like Evernote in this grave recession.
I've found it easy to cancel ... and several times where I forgot to cancel, customer services happily, easily and promptly refunded the charge ...
I'm no big tech Amazon fan ... but never had a problem.
Intentionally (?) breaking the site so that you can't cancel is another story.
Also CC use is declining across the world as more people are realizing the problem of debt trap, they should come up with alternative methods like UPI and bank transfer.
Most likely it's not going to happen. While the card is virtual, payments are done with real money. Risking to lose a customer with real money isn't something most businesses will do.
When Flash was sunset -- they gave a BS reasoning and shutdown this tool as well whithout making an effort to rebuild / replace.
I am surprised there was no big backlash from customers given the increasing online fraud and privacy/security consciousness of banking users.
Which (US) banks currently offer this virtual CC feature? I am a customer of three big banks/CC and none of them have this.
Any service like this that "requires the cloud," but is personal or individual and could be replaced by completely non-cloud software WILL go obsolete.
Obsidian, et al understand this.
Anyway, syncthing, among others.
Big difference with a full wysiwyg notebook with attachments. Afaik notion only does images. Devs love markdown but regular users don't.
But it's been years since I tried notion so perhaps this has changed.
It has changed dramatically.
I’d recommend getting off of Evernote anyway due to trends. However, is there evidence that this is newly urgent?
https://docs.syncthing.net/
I use Syncthing for all kinds of things and it's excellent, but it's not really a silver for bullet for mutable data like text files.
Need to get my Keepass database on my phone? Syncthing.
Need to back up my reMarkable to my NAS? Syncthing.
Need to replicate game saves between my PC and my Steamdeck because the game doesn't support Steam Cloud Sync (I'm looking at you, Subnautica)? Syncthing.
I run Paperless as a document management system and use Genius Scan on my phone. I use Syncthing to automatically move scans from my phone to the Paperless inbox folder.
And none of that data resides on a third party cloud. Just encrypted, peer-to-peer sync. It really is fantastic.
https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/
Think: replacing paper file folders with a digital system. Supports OCR, a variety of metadata, tagging and categories, etc.
My primary use case is taxes, but for any important legal or financial documents, I throw 'em in Paperless.
Does it run on those?
What I really like about it is that you don't have to sync everything everywhere. I have work folders I sync with just my work machines, and personal ones that go to my personal VPS.
See my reply to your parent commenter.
It's markdown, open-source, free. With desktop and mobile support.
Syncs notes to any cloud of your choice for free. (I use One Drive)
Optionaly you can pay them to sync your data on their cloud. So they even have a compelling business model!
I wasn't aware of markor and really like it, it seems to handle editing text files really well.
Already use syncthing, so why bother with joplin at all?
https://i.imgur.com/dK6trmN.png
But oh well, let's give it a try :D
Ideally, it'd just sync to webdav and I could use Nextcloud. But I've only ever found a few that did sync with it, and there were always all sorts of weird limitations or bugs in those.
Having a log maybe useful some day, though.
“Plain text is a powerful universal tool that is almost zero cost, work across platforms, are light enough to work remotely over poor connections, doesn’t go out of date, and is quick to learn.”
https://brajeshwar.com/2022/plain-text/
They hired bunch of great people and had some good backend tech -- sad to see this happen to them.
Evernote is older than the Iphone.
I just checked and I found a review of Evernote 1.0 from 2007, but I think the product predated that review. I found a web site saying the first Evernote Beta was released in 2004. I remember using Evernote in grad school in 2008.
Does anyone have a good alternative for this use-case?
JOPLIN:
Browsing through alternativeto [1], seems that the obvious replacement for a hosted 'non-tech' offering is Joplin [2] - a free, open source direct evernote competitor which includes Evernote import feature and cloud syncing.
PAPERLESS-NGX:
For the whole paperless office, scan/store receipts and PDF paperwork, I've been seriously looking at Paperless-NGX [3]. Downside is that you need to sort out self-hosting. Upside it's free and looks amazing for achieving a 'paperless office'.
Found this on exporting from Evernote to Paperless-NGX [4], but its not definitive.
Has anyone done this already? Would love your advice. Demand is out there for someone to write up a good guide on this.
REFERENCES:
[1] Alternatives to Evernote - https://alternativeto.net/software/evernote
[2] Joplin Open Source Evernote Alternative - https://joplinapp.org
[3] Paperless-NGX (Selfhosted paperless office) - https://docs.paperless-ngx.com
[4] Discussion Evernote to Paperless-ngx - https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/120mmo1/evernot...
https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx
Or you can try ours, which is based on Markdown (not open source) and a nested notecard format (not documents). Heavy emphasis on getting out of your way and just letting you write notes, though still with plenty of power if you need it. It has plenty of other cool features[2] and we're prepping for a pretty big 3.0 release in the very near future which should be exciting.
Yes, this is a very shameless plug. But in the spirit of Threads capitalizing on the upheaval at Twitter, I suppose I can do the same for Evernote.
[1] https://supernotes.app/alternatives/
[2] https://supernotes.app/features/
Evernote being a cautionary tale, I think you understand why no one would or should move their notes to closed system.
Being based on Markdown means notes are stored somewhere in the file system, like Obsidian?
Within the app we provide comprehensive export options[1] (you can export as markdown or as the actual JSON representation of a card that we use under-the-hood).
We also have a public API[2] that allows you to do whatever you want with your cards at any time with an API key. Currently the docs for this are still only an OpenAPI spec (and not an entirely complete one at that), but again that is something we are improving with the 3.0 release / subsequent releases.
So I wouldn't really describe ours as a closed system in the sense that Evernote was. In the case that Supernotes is ever acquired / shutdown / other black swan event for users, you should just be able to dump your cards into something like Obsidian and it will work pretty well, as we almost entirely respect the CommonMark spec.
[1] https://docs.supernotes.app/en/articles/3068672-printing-exp...
[2] https://api.supernotes.app/docs/swagger
But yes, if you are already locked in to the Apple ecosystem, free and pre-installed can be hard to compete with for a large set of users.
But on it's own keep gives me everything I need, except for the local markdown file database.
Furthermore, FOSS is orthogonal to support and usability. It's a meaningless property on its own.
I like open source a lot, but for my data I much prefer interoperable. I've watched too many projects and companies die and take my stuff with them.
I can't email notes into Obsidian. Obsidian doesn't have a web clipper, note reminders, markup tools. I mean sure, I could cover some of that with plug-ins, but at a certain point things become inconvenient.
For text-only notes Obsidian is great. For web clips, emailing notes in, multimedia, I just find EN much easier than trying to jam everything into a text editor.
I don’t care about any of those features. I care about capturing and organizing ideas that are almost always text.
It’s cool you like EN but I think that market is much smaller and EN was just reaching for super edge cases to please a few users and trying to get “regular” users to pay as well.
I do use Obsidian for text notes that are of my own making, but for pulling in media and other file types, I find a tool like EN so much easier to use.
Evernote was great. Honestly, it was worth paying for. But they gave away the farm too early, and folks feeling like what they had was being taken away from them spurned a lack of trust. Obsidian made the smartest play by giving you the editor, keeping the files outside of a database so that they're portable (so they feel safe if they ever have to move away), and telling you that if you want to own the sync story that you can, but you can pay to have the cohesive experience on every device.
There's work arounds (for example I forgot the name, but one plugin allows you to setup onedrive to share just one folder via logging in on each device), but the syncing story wasn't great. Quite a bit of extra setup across all devices, more points of failure etc.
Hence the smart business model, of let us handle it for you for a small cost.
I don't think so. They had plenty of paying customers. They claimed to be profitable for a long time (eg https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/evernote-rai...). They had trouble with (i) implementing big price hikes, and (ii) a poor, bug-filled user experience. While that was going on, they were facing increasing competition, yet they acting like a monopolist. OneNote, Google Docs, Dropbox Paper, Notion, and so on were providing a quality product at a better price. The lesson is one that many HN commenters would never accept. It's possible to set your price too high.
Even though OneNote is basically a loss-leader, it's extremely powerful and flexible. It's been around longer than any other note-app, and it's still here as Evernote fades into oblivion.
I have friends with OneNote and no matter what they explain, it does not make sense to me.
The client I was assigned to, used for everything on project management related documentation.
I couldn't understand how to approach it.
Then around 2019, in another project it suddenly made sense, after several approaches trying to make sense out of it.
Documentation to be shared across the team is in Confluence or similar wiki platform.
Documents to be shared with the customer are in Office formats.
It’s maddening and is my several times per week experience.
It's basically a cross between a messy desk and todo list. It works well enough for me. I've tried using stuff like Trello and that is a little too much friction for me, the way you can paste text and images together in OneNote and rearrange them visually just works for me. Sometimes it just feels right to have this item "off to the side" or that sort of thing.
And given how the "process cyclists" of Notion will move to anything that has more bells and whistles, while the rest of the 99% will use what's available for free and syncs online, it's a hard place to compete
("process cyclists": will pay a lot for every small but hyperoptimized accessory)
Call them "process cyclists" if you want, there is a bimodal distribution for how much people use notes apps, and the people near the high mode are prepared to pay monthly for something good, and tend to be extremely loyal.
Yes, but Evernote does not fit that category, it fits the 'feature' category
I transitioned to MacOS 10 years back.. and lo behold, free OneNote application available there too with free cloud storage (OneDrive) and cross device sync story (mobile, Windows). Works great.
Oh, and one peculiar restriction: I found that there was no way to import the .one files I had brought over from Windows, even though there was at least one third party system which could do it.
1. Instantly synced between all computers and devices (yes I know I need to be in the Mac/iPhone ecosystem, but I happen to be in that anyway)
2. Create folders
3. Paste images
4. Fonts/bullets etc.
Apparently that's all I need. Anything else is a hindrance.
I treed google keep and evernote. Syncing was always overwriting eachother. Starting slow.
I switched recently to Obsidian and am really enjoying the speed, simplicity, extensibility, and being back in control of my files.
Take the slightly more expensive family pack, and 5 people can use it on 5 devices each. It's one of the too-good-to-be-true deals out there.
Plaintext based notes apps are a blessing in that regard: Since they only store the text, your pages actually look nice and consistent. I have a ton of web clippings in OneNote which are ugly as hell because of font inconsistencies.
The point I was making is that they done no meaningful improvements on Android since five years. If onenote supports rich text the mobile app should do the same.
I enjoy the rich text since I'm not very organised with my notes, I don't have the patience or discipline to neatly write my thoughts down, I mostly copy paste things and write it in one big OneNote document. I have like 90 different random notes in my 2020 forward dumping note.
I those cases highlighting important info is nice, so I don't have to visually remember where the important things are.
I noticed if I don't allow the chaos I just don't write notes so I prefer this way. I started using todo tasks for things I need to do soon, so babysteps to becoming a compete human ;)
That, and while I love that their apps are native, there are serious consistency issues with eg. how search behaves, and the resurrected Windows app still not using the modern sync backend mobile, web and macOS do.
No business using the freemium model should expect to magically convert the free users to paid users and still retain the popularity generated by the free users. You would think as many times as tech companies have that shot themselves in the foot like this our industry might stop attempting to do this. When does this actually work?
For example, if Evernote had limited the free tier to 99 notes and syncing with 2 devices. That’s usable enough for a user to get a feel for whether they like it or not, but without an expectation that the free tier could support all their needs for note generation and storage.
The problem comes when the free tier is so restraint-free that people begin to use it as a daily driver without ever expecting to upgrade to a paid tier. At that point, the company has boxed themselves into a situation with users who generate costs but no corresponding revenues. Trying to convert _those_ users into paying customers is difficult or impossible, in my opinion.
If you have a product that works and makes a good profit, and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5 more, sometimes that just is the company.
In this context I think it is important to note that Ycombinator was founded in 2005. For the majority of its existence, and the general hype of tech startups, money was incredibly cheap. Now that the gears are switching, a lot of the advice given to startup founders does not work as well anymore.
Amen. I call this business model “tiny unicorn”. Been riding mine 25 years now.
VCs want to get you to grow rapidly because the only way to move the needle on their returns is to blow the roof off. However as a founder, this is proof you can have a great business and a great quality of life by keeping costs relatively low, the team relatively small, just cranking out code and having fun.
More power to em, if you prefer software be a certain way write it yourself.
[1] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen...
So, yes, they’ve done pretty well but they took a risk and still probably didn’t come close to maximizing comp even they had a rather good outcome.
And I just threw out the $150k number because it’s a very good outcome. Could just as easily be something a lot lower including negative.
In aggregates: Household income > individual income > wage/salary; you've confused the first with the last.
$150K is beyond 90th percentile individual income. [0] I can’t find wage/salary percentiles separately, but its probably even further beyond 90th percentile there.
https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-perce...
But, we started with two people. At some point we needed funding. That put us on a track of angel investors, VC's, and a cycle acquisition, buyback, funding, acquisition, buyback, etc.
As the techie guy, I found that tiring and distracting. When we changed from software as a product to SAAS, it got a lot less fun. When we grew to 2000 employees (mostly non-tech), the company was a pain.
So after 20 years (to the day), we sold it and moved on.
If you were back to two people with a promising idea, how would you do it this time?
C'mon now. With that attitude, how are you ever going to get imploded on top of the Titanic, or buy a social media company so you can smash it against the wall like a toddler with a toy truck? You want to live a comfortable, happy life, with happy employees and customers? No way! This is capitalism, baby! Fuck your customers and your employees, it's your right to throw them into a vat of acid so you can blow millions of their dollars to spend 30 minutes in the stratosphere wearing a cowboy hat! If you don't do it, someone else will!
It's not fair because the larger company continues to get VC funding which allows it to subsidize features or even give them away for free. Remember, all these companies are effectively racing to become monopolies and part of that process is "price dumping" to kill of smaller competitors. Again, this sucks, but those are the incentives VCs provides and companies have to oblige or get swallowed up by bigger fish.
I was a happy customer in the beginning. Until I didn't have an important note that I had prepared for a meeting, because it didn't sync to my phone. A few weeks later, it happened again. I lost trust in the app.
Then the Android App got worse and worse. It sometimes didn't sync at all. Notes would conflict all the time, and I'd lose work.
For some reason, Evernote (both android app and windows client) just seemed to get worse every year.
I kept hoping, as theoretically Evernote is absolutely perfect for my needs, if it would just work. But clearly the writing is on the wall at this point and I need to find an alternative.
Over the past 10 days it has started displaying a daily upgrade message forcing me to the new tab-less Electron app. I'm resisting but I've no doubt it will stop syncing any day.
Much of my daily workflow is focused around Evernote. It's going to a pain to move but I am going to. If they'd have just left things alone I would have been a paying customer probably until my dying day.
Electron is a great tool tbh, I'm not on the hate train, but let's not pretend like electron is some bastion of quality or performance. People's grievances are legitimate, and part of that reason is just how low the bar is to ship something with it. Great for tinkerers, but sours normal users.
It has since got better but I haven't gone back to paying for it, despite using it a lot, and now I'll probably slowly migrate away as they progressively break and disable the free version.
When they started the personal plan was paid (after first 1k blocks or so), then in 2020 they’ve lifted that restriction[0].
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236786
Evernote's killer feature was its ability to "scan" paper documents with a smartphone and to be able to search on those documents in the future.
Notion is just a Markdown editor.
The market is different, and Notion has always had a present limitation of how much a free account can get away with, even if it is generous. There's a pretty stark difference in saying "have the whole enchilada for free" at first and then "now we're limiting the devices you can sync to" or "now these other features you had are no longer free", vs. "your usage is always metered, and there is a generous free tier". I do imagine there is some sense in that if the free tier threshold was reduced that would cause some pain, but setting the expectation of "lunch is free, all you can eat" and then pivoting to "lunch is still mostly free but now you have to pay for desert" is going to make anyone mad that they have to pay for dessert now.
Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use. At least as far as I know. You can get your disk space in a lot of ways, some bundled with other products you may use making it appear “free” but even if you host your own cloud storage you’re going to pay something for it.
Even if Evernote is better than notes on your iPhone, is it $10 a month better? Probably not.
Google drive?
You can also get some free MBs from Microsoft, Proton and so on, and, Dropbox also has a free tier.
However, Dropbox have some underrated yet very powerful features like Apps and automations. I buy books from plethora of places, and new versions of the products I have are uploaded automatically. I just receive a notification. Same for some fonts and design assets I have. SendOwl leverages this capability for anyone, easily.
Auto organization, a clunky but reliable native Linux application, LANSync, etc. are all good things to have, and they have solved the syncing problem.
Also, Google Drive is a ticking time bomb, because if you accidentally put a file Google doesn't like, you have the risk to lose all your Google access at the middle of the night.
Dropbox costs €10 / user / month while Google Drive costs $12 / user / month.
https://support.google.com/drive/answer/10838124?hl=en-GB
Maybe not completely free, but iCloud desktop sync is pretty much a native MacOS clone of Dropbox. Especially for its core feature of cross-device syncing. Perhaps less so for sharing, although MacOS has been slowly adding those features to the point where I no longer get much value out of dropbox at all.
Still paying though, mostly out of laziness to migrate (which is literally as simple as dragging the files into a folder on my desktop, honestly I’m not sure why I haven’t done this yet)
It's why I ended up switching to OneDrive. (Which I ended up paying for later.)
That’s an odd framing. How about “when they didn’t support the filesystem I use”?
If some software is only available on Windows I doubt anyone would say that the vendor is trying to “dictate what OS I use”.
To be clear it is trivial to thwart the check, but shared library shims can't fix the real problem which is pointless corporate contempt. Particularly if I'm paying for it.
Put another way, do you think the combined users of file systems which aren’t supported ext4, xfs, btrfs, or zfs are willing to pay more or would quietly accept the possibility of data loss? I doubt the former is true and have absolute certainty that if there was a bug using an unsupported file system that would result in angry, hyperbolic blog posts saying Dropbox is unsafe and will lose your data.
But they were doing seeming fine ? It's not some new VC funded corp that failed after 5 years
What stops you to sync for free using free Dropbox or OneDrive accounts?
Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having an app to easily edit those files is super cheap.
It was free in the beginning because this is a “classic” software problem where it’s cheap to develop and close to $0 marginal dollars for a user.
When Evernote started charging for dumb features and locking in my notes, I switched to one of many free, open source, or very cheap alternatives.
I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then pushed up prices, and customers mehhed out.
The lesson here is to do something valuable or do something cheap. But don’t do something not valuable and expensive.
Sync is nice, but notes can be easily synced everywhere by layering on top of Dropbox or iCloud or whatever. I don’t want custom Evernote sync and I especially don’t want to pay as much as Dropbox for it. Id rather just pay for Dropbox and then toss in a bunch of files.
For the owners/shareholders of that particular 1-2 person company, do they wish it had stayed one, or are they glad it didn't?
I have to hope that the original owners really wanted to make the best product possible and lost their heads with the power to create that they thought the investments would bring.
That's may even be fine for some bits of data. But, for anything I want access to long-term, I just can't trust SaaS start-ups anymore. Very few acquisitions end up with a favorable outcome for the customers. Sometimes the service gets unceremoniously shut down. In other cases the app gets folded in to some other product the parent company owns. In yet others the product suffers as the parent company tries to squeeze what it can from the existing consumer base.
I have no real interest in trying to scrape my data out of a vault so I can recreate it elsewhere. Increasingly, I limit my choices to established players with a history of long-term product support (e.g., Apple or Microsoft, but not Google) or OSS. I'm sure in the short-term I'm missing out on new functionality that could increase my productivity, but I don't like the anxiety of knowing I could lose all my data in an instant and so I don't truly engage with such products. My primary concern is no longer than the company will go out of business but rather that they'll try to shoehorn a growth model that doesn't make sense for the core product so they can then sell and sail off into the sunset.
Obsidian is an interesting case where's it's not an established company and it's not OSS, but they've made it possible for you to ensure long-term access to your data. If needed, there could be an OSS-equivalent of Obsidian to read those files. But, I'm happy to just pay them for a good product. If they were to have a big exit, that's great for them and I don't think I'd be impacted very much.
The trend in software has been a move to walled gardens and there's been strong adoption there, so I don't think my mindset on the topic is a prevailing opinion. But, I have noticed family members and such have grown increasingly tired of service shutdowns from acquisitions. Expensive devices become bricks. Important data goes away. Etc.
Obsidian: also worth looking at DEVONthink for similar reasons, but with the advantage that you have a choice of sync services including running your own. The database is open, but a risk point is that it uses RTFD for notes with graphics. That's not supported off the Apple platform, but there are similar risks with any method of storing notes with graphics.
A common tactic now is to have this idea of lock-in. That if you don't continue to use said service you loose everything. This forces you into that subscription and makes it extremely hard to transfer and move.
I have seen many apps that lock data export behind enterprise subscriptions - that have no pricing and only "contact us".
I do think there are times it may make sense to have some unique file format (maybe your app does something special and needs that format) but there should always be a way to get that data into something more standard. Whether that's a text file, a CSV file or something else.
Are Evernote files just plain "text files"?
But they should be just text files with pointers to non-text things.
Creating a proprietary format just because is an unnecessary complexity and cost.
I used Evernote for 5-10 years and had thousands of notes. I had maybe 10-20 photographs or diagrams mixed in, but mostly it was text.
Not sure how common my use is, but they kept adding stuff I didn’t want. And it’s now a “free” feature in Apple notes, onenote and countless others.
I think the difference is that Microsoft and Apple are just trying to find efficient ways to store data in their cloud storage. Evernote was trying to find ways to make customers pay for note taking.
When it comes to pure “notes” I find either Google Keep or Apple Notes are good enough and work with less effort on my part so that’s where most of my scribbles go.
I see what you mean. But at the same time I do have the brainpower to simply remember to save my notes into the "notes" folder, which I then sync into some cloud storage.
Or even just use Google Keep. I'm fine pasting links, copying pictures, and jotting quick notes down. I didn't necessarily need inking support on my end. Condolances to those who did, as well as other features like audio and others I can't remember off the top of my head.
This is the problem with most VC funded startups. You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees. When it comes time to actually make a profit, these companies struggle because the value proposition simply isn't there for what they're offering.
Take GrubHub and DoorDash for example. Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction? No. But someone has to pay back the billions spent on useless corporate bloat and thousands of employees.
At one level I shouldn't care. The VCs burn the money, the users make a bad choice to rely on something that will inevitably disappear when the profit-seeking crunch comes, not my problem.
But it's unfortunately for all of us because all this human energy (from users, developers) that gets wasted over and over on doomed-to-fail proprietary solutions could be so much better spent on developing, using and promoting open source distributed solutions that can stand the test of time.
To be fair, it’s only “an ordering system” if you look purely at pick-up ordering. For deliveries, these apps are two-sided real-time resource schedulers (allocating a driver to N orders they can efficiently deliver through pickups and drop offs on a single precalculated connecting route to optimize both time and fuel consumption.) The value is in the backend software, as the very same backend software should be reusable for e.g. routing driverless taxis.
Looking at problems naively it looks simple but it's -really- not that simple if you want it to do WELL.
While I agree with the sentiment, it is worth noting that the 30% helps cover the delivery-person’s cut. Ideally, there should be a fixed cost courier charge, but that’s tangential to the point here.
Especially for double-sided markets like food delivery where you have a chicken and egg problem - why providers sign up when there aren’t users and why would users sign up when there aren’t any providers.
That’s a human problem, not a technical one, and is the expensive bit.
You are just looking at the tip of the iceberg. Being essentially a CRUD app doesn’t mean it is less complex than other software. This is similar to saying “Facebook is just a web site, I could make that over a weekend.”
Just an endless series of features that I never wanted.
At least, they used to be. I haven’t checked recently, but this was the case for many years. Don’t know if they’ve changed anything recently.
Not the same features, worse features. They intentionally abandoned Evernote Classic that was like 3 time faster, not clattered, practically without ads, and with more-more features. I will happily pay Evernote some reasonable price if my experience will be better, not worse..
1. there are opensource tools to convert from evernote to obsidian so it Just Works [tm] and you don't lose anything.
2. My docs are now in markdown in a normal filesystem so it's easy for me to back them up, sync them, have everything work on different OSs etc
3. I choose to pay for obsidian sync because I want to fund them but you don't have to
4. Community plugins are awesome. For example I just got done editing my "Linear Algebra Cheat sheet" which is full of Latex equations. It looks beautiful, if I want to jump into vim to edit I can but editing in obsidian works fine also.
It's a real gem among mountains of SaaS/VC nonsense.
But I don't trust them and haven't since they made it difficult to export all of your notes. And, they damaged tag-based organization by changing to only list notes that are at the bottom of the tag hierarchy - not those in the middle.
And, they want to be the sole custodian my data, and I don't like a company with that attitude.
Having been involved with system design including large servers for 50 years, I don't trust the cloud. Yeah, the huge cloud providers are staffed by really smart people and it is very unlikely you'll lose your data there (although I sure wouldn't trust Google - they're nuts with their product management).
But a small staff Evernote, under pressure to please investors by somehow adding features that will let them compete in spaces already pretty full - no, I don't trust them to adequately use the cloud to keep my data secure.
I do frequent .enex backups of all my notes.
I haven't switched yet, because it's a pain. But I sure do backups frequently.
And if I see a good alternative (maybe in this thread), I'll jump on it.
As long as I don't have to do the sysadmin all the time (I'd forget - busy with other things, or I'd make some dumb mistake); and as long as it isn't a giant pain to install and build. And as long as it has clients for MacOS (including Apple ARM processors), Android and iOS... then I'll look.
Ideas sought.
The last time I did this search (2020), I didn't find one I liked.
To me, the real story is that Evernote sucked for a long time. They never evolved and what worked in 2008 stopped working a while ago. Notion and Obsidian and iCloud ate their lunch, and all apps these days are so well connected that you could even use Slack for reminders and self messages and get most of the note taking functionality that you would ever need.
Evernote when I used it a decade ago was great, but not irreplaceable.
I doubt many people do anymore, which is probably the reason it's being dismantled. Sic transit gloria mundi.