“Evernote cites ‘building the Evernote of tomorrow’ as one of the reasons for the price increase. The problem is, we as users really haven’t seen much of a change in their service. For example, using Evernote as a basic notetaker is still a fairly painful experience. Exporting and sharing documents from Evernote is not as easy as it should be. I’m all for innovation, but asking the users to pay for it before you deliver is going to be a tough sell.“
Katie Floyd, long-time Evernote user.
That’s a really good take. I’ve been a Premium Evernote user for many, many years. But even before this latest price increase, I’d cancelled my auto-renew, and moved my Notes to Apple’s Notes app. The Notes app needs a lot of work, but Apple is chipping away at it. And the fact is, I don’t really need a lot of bells and whistles on my note taking app. I need two things.
One, the ability to file, manage and find as needed pdfs and other files, as a digital file cabinet for my paperless archival system. For a long time I used Evernote for this. Over time I realized I don’t need a separate, dedicated app for archiving and accessing documents. Finder on my Mac, combined with Dropbox on all my devices, does this as well or better than Evernote. Sure, I have to pay for Dropbox, but I’m going to do that anyway, so Evernote feels like an unnecessary spend.
Two, a simple but reasonably featured note taking app to take and keep notes for quick reference and some projects-in-progress. Apple’s Notes app does this well enough. It doesn’t handle pdfs perfectly, but it handles them well enough for quick reference purposes, again with the heavy archival lifting done via Finder and Dropbox. And as bad as Notes is with pdfs, it handles them way, way better than OneNote. I tried for 2 weeks to take notes and manage project materials in OneNote. It just didn’t work for me. At all.
So my current workflow is based on my ScanSnap scanner, scanning to designated folders, viewed and managed via Finder and backed up and synced via Dropbox. With quick notes and oft-used reference cards residing in the Notes app. Oh, and Google Keep serving as a free and handy cross-platform clipboard as needed.
Before today, I figured I’d continue to use my free Evernote account for something. But the 2-device limit makes that infeasible. I’m not mad at Evernote for trying to make more money. I understand. It’s just that the price hike on the heels of so little feature advancement leads me to pass.
Good luck Evernote, we had a good ride.
Newsome.Org 