Evernote’s Price Hike and where to from here…

Call this a response to latest news if you will but I have today read the recent update from Evernote and I have a response that I would like to make to it. I know what you are thinking….”Get in line pal” but here are my thoughts on Evernote’s price hike and where to from here.

You can read the latest update here.

The gist of what is said in that post is that firstly, Evernote are increasing their prices. Significantly increasing their prices. And secondly, they have some feature updates coming soon, notably with regard to AI usage.

Evernote’s Price hike

I want to get something out of the way right at the outset. I have no issue with an app raising it’s prices, in fact I expect it. There are many good reasons for an app to increase it’s subscription cost, reasons that I would fully support. For example, as cost of living and cost of production and costs generally rise owing to inflation, it makes perfect sense that an app would raise its prices incrementally over time to cover this cost. Also, an app may choose to enter the market with a low price point in order to gain more users and more traction. This would naturally be followed by a price hike later down the line.

However, Evernote’s update cites the main reason for the price increase being the release of new features. It explains the last price rise was in 2016 and since then so many new features have been added to the app to justify this. Here is my problem, the subscription model is based on just this very idea. Waaay back when, until the mid 2010s, any software you bought, at least at the personal level, was bought as a standalone piece of software. Every year or so a new version would be released, with more features, fewer bugs and better performance. Consumers could then choose whether to upgrade and purchase the new version, again at a standalone cost. If you chose not to, you could continue to use the version that you had with all the features intact. I suspect many did the same as me and upgraded every other version. Then, the subscription model comes in. Now users pay a monthly or annual fee. This comes in really with the advent of faster wireless broadband internet as products can be downloaded and installed at speeds not known before. It also meant the advent of data being stored in the cloud. So the idea being that the subscription covers the cost of using the cloud based aspects of the apps, such as syncing and cloud storage and…