Why I turned my back on Evernote

I have written here about my enthusiasm for Evernote, my note taking app since 2008. Forty two thousand notes and fifteen years later my love affair has ended.

An Italian company purchased Evernote and laid off the entire US staff. The culture changed, long standing implied commitments were abandoned. It was their right to do so of course; as it is users rights to not regard them.

<Cross posted from my Newsletter Family Tech>

To keep up additional posts on this topic, search on the tag Notes Folder

For example, they doubled the price I was paying. Admittedly it was the only price raise in seven years but many felt doubling was harsh. A gradual step over a few years might have been more palatable.

And the severely restricted Free version was kneecapped. It used to be you could upload 2 megabytes of notes a month into up to 99 notebooks. They reduced that to one notebook, and a total of fifty notes ever! The only recourse was to subscribe for $15 a month.

If you have a free version with thousands of notes, you can still read them, you just cannot add more.

Retaining those limits but charging $1, $3, or even $5 a month would have been palatable. I can not help but to think they made a critical error here.

I looked at alternatives like OneNote, Notion, Joplin and Obsidian and was not thrilled with any of them.

Instead, I rethought my use of Evernote and decided I could meet my needs with Google Docs or Microsoft’s OneDrive.

I use this newsletter of my old Family Tech newspaper column, helping those who have to use tech, but are not smitten with it. My blog has always been more for my fellow tech lovers. I outlined my ideas about using Google Docs on my blog, and will publish updates about the idea there. I invite readers to look at it.

Comments

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