This service should not cost more than 3 dollars a month, for example most of my previously Evernoted friends used to migrate to Telegram free storage. Maybe Telegram provides only mediafile storage with no advanced search - but the search algorythm among your text document should not be significantly costier than GNU Emacs in Org-mode.
Stepan Pachikov is so great guy, I listened a lot of his talks. I am sad to live without his software, without screenshot editing software having red arrows of some specific form and without the search which worked really well. Good-bye yet another greedy corporation.
I remember using Evernote in the very early 2010s, pre acquistion, and before OneNote got really good/had a cloud sync service.
Evernote was...fine, but the UX was very stilted. Text placement was very restrictive, and the spontaneous nature of taking notes was suppressed by it generally forcing you to type linearly as if it were a Word document.
I used it for the ability to seamlessly sync between devices, but once OneNote 2013 hit, I dropped Evernote like a rock in a lake. It had no competitive drive in terms of functionality once MS wiped the floor with them.
Text placement being restrictive is exactly what I want. I hate onenote’s sloppy feel. That is how some people want it, but people like me don’t. Seems like there should be some ways to address both audiences
I left Evernote when it became increasingly bloated and clunky as a product (on iOS at the time), and as they started tightening the screws on the free plan.
My current generic note-taker is SimpleNote. It is Multiplatform, it syncs, and it's free. It does 1/20th of what Evernote does but that didn't matter.
SimpleNote has always been the standard to me for what note taking needs to be, but the lack of encryption makes it a non-starter for me. StandardNotes comes close.
Purely an aside but I went to the StandardNotes website and the first thing that struck me was how all over the place their AI generated product images were.
I made the same transition, and it felt very seamless. I didn't look into the Obsidian first-party sync service, since I was already using Syncthing at that point.
For even more contrast with Evernote: the fantastic Obsidian application lists eight employees and one cat on their about page:
Same. Obsidian is a bit more DIY feeling, not as polished of an interface but it does exactly what I need… and their sync engine is fast as hell. I pay for sync. I know I don’t need to if I really wanted to run it for free, but it’s worth it (and 50% cheaper than Evernote soon, while supporting the company)
I loved Evernote, it plus David Allen GTD changed my work life for the better.
But the bloat kept bloating endlessly. I filled in Evernote's surveys, I offered to double my payment for an Evernote Classic with just the feature set of 2012 or so. No teams, no chat, definitely no AI. Just my notes on every device, searchable and silently synced.
> Lock-in is the game. Users will pay. Many companies under-price their product and suffer the consequences.
Well, just yesterday the WSJ published an article [1] about bending spoons that include this detail:
> Evernote, a note-taking app acquired in 2023, was among the holdings Bending Spoons profiled in its IPO prospectus. Evernote’s revenue was 30% higher in 2025 than in 2022, and during that time average revenue per monthly active user rose 150%. What the prospectus didn’t say: Those figures meant the number of users fell 48%. Revenue rose through price increases as the customer base shrank.
That's bending spoons' business model. Buy a declining business and drive it into the ground by extracting as much value as they can from the customers still dependent on it.
It's basically the broadcom model for VMware. Sadly this model is very popular these days.
I'm very happy with obsidian these days though I don't use their sync service. The self hosted livesync is pretty good though a bit quirky at times.
I would have probably still kept paying for Evernote if they just split the application into Evernote Classic (w/o any of the Collab, texting, bloat) and another with all the bells and bloat.
At the end, it was so bloated that there was a slight lag in the editor which made it infuriating to type on it. Switched and never looked back.
> The business could clearly be made profitable – Bending Spoons proved that in a few months. The problem was that Evernote had raised over $200M at a unicorn valuation and investors needed a billion-dollar exit. No amount of expense-cutting turns a $100M ARR note-taking app into a billion-dollar company.
a) "dead"? i guess its horn got sawed off and now it is a plain old horse.
b) i had forgotten evernote had notifications (it probably still does! i presume i turned them off around 2009 and the setting has stuck). i presume it's literally only feature release announcements and MAU-farming zero-party ads (aka feature existence proclamations), what else COULD it be?
Very interesting tale. I’ve had to leave a tech job that simply pestered everyone until they left. It’s cheaper for them tat way but it sucked for all of uw.
I am very thankful to Evernote. In May/June 2016 they restricted their free tier to 1 device, which pushed me to migrate and in the process discover Emacs+org-mode, which I've been using since then along with syncthing. It was a game changer and liberated my notes so I can arbitrarily manipulate them in ways I couldn't have imagined doing with their app.
They just sent out pricing updates and it’s nearly doubling the price I was paying before. Their lower tier limits my usage and is still 75% of what I’m paying now.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 2.6 ms ] threadStepan Pachikov is so great guy, I listened a lot of his talks. I am sad to live without his software, without screenshot editing software having red arrows of some specific form and without the search which worked really well. Good-bye yet another greedy corporation.
Evernote was...fine, but the UX was very stilted. Text placement was very restrictive, and the spontaneous nature of taking notes was suppressed by it generally forcing you to type linearly as if it were a Word document.
I used it for the ability to seamlessly sync between devices, but once OneNote 2013 hit, I dropped Evernote like a rock in a lake. It had no competitive drive in terms of functionality once MS wiped the floor with them.
My current generic note-taker is SimpleNote. It is Multiplatform, it syncs, and it's free. It does 1/20th of what Evernote does but that didn't matter.
For even more contrast with Evernote: the fantastic Obsidian application lists eight employees and one cat on their about page:
https://obsidian.md/about
I loved Evernote, it plus David Allen GTD changed my work life for the better.
But the bloat kept bloating endlessly. I filled in Evernote's surveys, I offered to double my payment for an Evernote Classic with just the feature set of 2012 or so. No teams, no chat, definitely no AI. Just my notes on every device, searchable and silently synced.
Well, just yesterday the WSJ published an article [1] about bending spoons that include this detail:
> Evernote, a note-taking app acquired in 2023, was among the holdings Bending Spoons profiled in its IPO prospectus. Evernote’s revenue was 30% higher in 2025 than in 2022, and during that time average revenue per monthly active user rose 150%. What the prospectus didn’t say: Those figures meant the number of users fell 48%. Revenue rose through price increases as the customer base shrank.
So, a lot of users were not willing to pay.
1. https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/at-bending-spoons-the-...
It's basically the broadcom model for VMware. Sadly this model is very popular these days.
I'm very happy with obsidian these days though I don't use their sync service. The self hosted livesync is pretty good though a bit quirky at times.
At the end, it was so bloated that there was a slight lag in the editor which made it infuriating to type on it. Switched and never looked back.
I expect the same is true of Airtable.
a) "dead"? i guess its horn got sawed off and now it is a plain old horse.
b) i had forgotten evernote had notifications (it probably still does! i presume i turned them off around 2009 and the setting has stuck). i presume it's literally only feature release announcements and MAU-farming zero-party ads (aka feature existence proclamations), what else COULD it be?
It’s just accelerated my exit plan.