Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

[baron816]

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.

[belthesar]

I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did.

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.

[prepend]

I think it’s an example of trying to charge for things that are low value, and, more importantly, low cost.

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.

[janxgeist]

For me, it's an example of a company messing up the technical side.

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.

[PhoenixReborn]

Also Obsidian is a small team (< 5 people IIRC?) and they don't have to monetize as aggressively to make back the money that VCs have funded them with.

[seanhunter]

I have to say changing to obsidian has been great.

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.

[weare138]

But this also seems to be another case of tech companies trying to have it's cake and eat it too like the recent reddit debacle. The freemium model comes with trade-offs and businesses can't have it both ways. 'Free' users should be viewed as free marketing and advertising for generating paid users not as lost potential revenue.

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?

[ramraj07]

Sounds like Dropbox has made the transition just fine. If you’re gonna ask me to pay a tenner a month you better give me what I think is the dollars worth of value. Dropbox did. Evernote did not. At least not for the vast majority of people who barely take some notes on some rare days.

[stevage]

For me, it's an example of a company building an app that did a thing well, but not a thing people would pay for. And then switching out the app for this monstrous platformy enterprisey catastrophe that I sure as hell never wanted, and being told to pay for it.

Just an endless series of features that I never wanted.

[bachmeier]

> Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features

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.

[ergonaught]

I was a paying customer for many years. Despite their continuous attempts to turn it into something I didn't need and eventually didn't want because they wouldn't leave it alone, they didn't manage to run me off until last year. That coincided with the acquisition but I honestly no longer recall if that was the final straw, as they'd been increasingly aggravating me for a while.

[TheMiddleMan]

Don't you think having so many competitors offering free notes apps is a large part of it?

[kdazzle]

Remember Evernote had those physical notebooks where you could write in them with real pens and pay the subscription and then take a picture and upload them with OCR? That was the only thing I remember that you couldnt get for free.

[ilyt]

> I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did.

But they were doing seeming fine ? It's not some new VC funded corp that failed after 5 years

[acumenical]

I don't buy it.

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.

[johnnyanmac]

Big issue is competition. you're never going to compete in this space as a premium service when users can take their notes and throw them on MS Notes or Google Keep or the 20 other note taking apps. Or simply use any number of cloud solutions and keep them in any variety of text/picture files.

Evernote when I used it a decade ago was great, but not irreplaceable.

[srvmshr]

I would like to pick your brain about Notion for the reasoning you mentioned. Do you think Notion would be the next Evernote - in both the good and the bad way? Both the services are serving the same segment of the consumer market & both started out with generous offerings for free. I could be wrong how I see it but it would be nice to hear something interesting.

[arbitrary_name]

I cannot stand how difficult it is to create, use, and copy/paste tables. It means I'm forced to stick with OneNote.

[deelly]

> to convert free users to paying users for the same features

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..

[wpietri]

I agree freemium plans have hazards like that. But as somebody who never converted, it was because Evernote always felt kinda shaky for me. I was willing to pay for great, reliable software. But them asking for money for adequate but buggy software was a hard sell for me.

[DeathArrow]

> 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

What stops you to sync for free using free Dropbox or OneDrive accounts?

[julianz]

I wonder how that 100 year guarantee is holding up?

https://longnow.org/ideas/evernote-and-the-100-year-data-gua...

[stevefan1999]

In case if you want some Evernote alternatives, here's my shortlist:

1. Trilium Notes: https://github.com/zadam/trilium

2. AppFlowy: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy

3. Affine: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE

4. Joplin: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin

5. Dendron: https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron (requires VSCode)

As a programmer I liked Dendron the most but if you want it to be packed with absolute features, try Trilium Notes (but some considered it to be feature creep and bloated)

[cborenstein]

I'm biased but I'd add--

- Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/

- Logseq: https://logseq.com/

- Reflect: https://reflect.app/

- Stashpad: https://stashpad.com/

[benoliver999]

I like and use joplin. Waiting for it to sync sucks (even though it's pretty quick) but I like that you can edit in vim on the desktop and a dedicated app on mobile.

I use it for recipes, where it's easiest to write them on a laptop but better to read them on a phone/tablet.

[gaia]

Unfortunately Trilium, the closest option to Evernote (as opposed to Notion), doesn't have an Android client (there is one to send notes but not search/read).

Looks like Joplin is the one checking all the right boxes (added plus of being able to sync via OneDrive, which is free, and with E2E I don't care which cloud it sits on)

[RDaneel0livaw]

I've been using StandardNotes for years and been happy with them. Is there a reason I should look elsewhere at these or other alternatives? It's just interested I am not seeing this product mentioned anywhere here!

[coffeeling]

Dendron is no longer developed, and in any case is intended for a very different use case than Evernote.

Amplenote might be a better drop-in replacement.

[Charlie_26]

Do any permit a transfer-in from Evernote?

[alsargent]

Thanks. As an Evernote user since 2007, and paying customer for several years, this sucks.

I’m curious: why is Notion not on your short list?

[2rsf]

Which one is the most future proof? I recently tried Organice, even though it has a different feature set, because is is basically future proof even if the hosting company tops functioning

[civilized]

My Evernote use peaked in 2013-2014, during a whirlwind postdoctoral fellowship. Man, I loved that thing. So simple and responsive. It was a real tool of thought, and I used it for everything. From then on, it got worse and worse every time I "upgraded", and I basically stopped using it since 2016 or so.

Yesterday I "upgraded" at its urging, against my better judgment, and was greeted with a lovely surprise: no local notes anymore. Only cloud sync. The justification for this was basically "less capability is actually good for users", phrased in more or less that way. It seemed like the developers were blinking torture at me.

Evernote was a big blackpill. My bitterest realization that technology doesn't necessarily progress, and many products are just trapped in a cycle of tragedy.

[mmchicago]

You took the words out of my mouth. Exactly my experience, except I deleted my account in 2020. Evernote taught me to stop trusting startups with critical services, to manage my own notes, and to always have an exit strategy.

[Brajeshwar]

I like to bring up my personal opinion and realization of owning an open format -- plain-text - content for your life-long textual contents.

I was once an Evernote user since its early days and a premium subscriber for many years. I have used many notetaking apps and bought enough of them – iA Writer, ByWord, Bear, SimpleNote, nvAlt fork of Notational Velocity, etc.

I have moved to a simpler notetaking and writing habit for my notes. I have chosen a simple plain-text life. The idea is to approach contents as data-first with tools on the top. I have grown to like the simple methods I use and the philosophies of managing the files and the directories/folders.

I wrote about it sometime back - https://brajeshwar.com/2022/plain-text/

[Douger]

For the last 5 days I have been actively trying to cancel my Evernote personal plan. The site would break every time I navigated to manage my subscription or try and reach support.

I guess that's one way to reduce customer churn.

[teeray]

The new features will be feeding everyone's notes into an LLM and then screaming "AI!" at the top of their lungs to investors.

[swayson]

Obsidian.md for the win. I used to use evernote way back when they started, was cool software, then they started scaling and added worst search UI I have ever come across. That day, I deleted my account and went markdown with my own storage. Don't see the benefit of why your notes should be controlled by others.

[FreezerburnV]

This REALLY SUCKS. I’ve been using Evernote as a catch-all app for a bit now: scanning documents for paperless, archiving website snapshots, notes for various things (I love being able to make a note tied to a calendar event!), the super good OCR capabilities, task management (even if buggy…), etc. It does a lot for me, and it has great capabilities for bringing information/content into it. There is literally nothing else out there that has the unique set of capabilities I actively use in the same package. (And no, Joplin is not “just as good”) Unbundling to multiple places that don’t have the same capabilities (not to mention not having their supposed upcoming AI search I was really looking forward to) is going to be an absolute downgrade for me and make it harder to manage my life.

If someone knows of something that can fill the void of Evernote so I don’t have to like, use Apple Notes with Reminders (which while you can access them on Windows via the browser, it’s a mediocre experience at best) and like raindrop.io for website archival all at the same time.

And I’m not moving to OneNote which while it might have most of that stuff, I hate using it.

[DeathArrow]

Boss1: let's create a great note taking app

Employee1: creates a great note taking app

Customers: :) :) :)

Boss2: let's milk more money, does anyone have a good idea?

Bean Counter: let's add some useless crap, our customer base will quadruple

Employee1: ads useless crap

Customers: ? ? ?

Boss3: let's milk more money, does anyone have a good idea?

Bean Counter: let's fire Employee1, hire Employee2 for half the wage and rewrite everything in Electron

Employee2: rewrites everything in Electron

Customers: :( :( :(

[arthurofbabylon]

For those looking for a focused alternative to Evernote, check out minimal.app – I built Minimal as the antithesis of Evernote: instead of clutter and feature bloat, Minimal offers focus and simplicity. I love Minimal and use it every day, simply because it is the most focused notes app I could find.

Minimal's most innovative feature is the Note Lifetime, whereby notes "die" when they go unedited for so many days. (The Note Lifetime is customizable, and notes remain available in a deleted notes folder.) The effect is an always-clean collection of notes that truly reflects the present moment. Another effect is more action on the persistent, good ideas and less action/procrastination on the ideas that might be best let go of.

Anyone interested in helping me improve the app, craft the roadmap, or simply get premium features for free can join the beta at minimal.app/#beta.

[vzaliva]

Personal journey: I used to be a heavy user of Evernote, but encountered a bug that the developers were not keen on fixing promptly. It was then that I realized the importance of personal notes surviving beyond companies, apps, and formats. Quickly after, I switched to a collection of plain text files using org-mode markdown and have been happy ever since.

[timetraveller26]

And to think that at one point Evernote was THE note taking app. So much wasted potential.

[smarx007]

My use of Evernote has been replaced with two apps a few years ago when they abandoned native apps:

1. https://obsidian.md/ for all the notes.

2. https://archivebox.io/ for almost all webpage clippings.

[woodardj]

There's lots of discussion here about the pros and cons of Evernote, and a slew of alternatives, but this HN post is the only result online since February (when there was lots of news about a Bending Spoons/Evernote layoff), what's the source for this July update?

[fastball]

Here is an (incomplete) list[1] of random note-taking apps that you can try if you are leaving Evernotes.

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/

[snowpalmer]

For anyone that used Evernote as a "Document Storage" app instead of just purely notes, I found Notebooks, https://www.notebooksapp.com/, https://www.notebooksapp.com/ to be a good replacement.

It works with files on your harddrive and your existing cloud storage (icloud / dropbox.) macOS/iOS only, but for someone who primarily is storing PDFs this was a much better fit than more alternates that are for taking notes.

[tombert]

I really hope that this endless wave of layoffs ends soon. I've been let go twice in the last year. Every tech place is going through layoffs and is pausing hiring.

I wrote a browser plugin to automatically fill out a lot of the job application forms, so that I can apply to more jobs in a day, and I get maybe one interview for every three hundred applications. I watch endless tutorials on YouTube about the best way to interview, I spend hours doing problems on Hackerrank or Project Euler, just to be told that they were "impressed by my abilities but they don't think I would be a good fit at this time, but they'll keep my resume on file".

The part that's even worse than rejection for me is idiotic and disingenuous email that I am expected to send to the hiring manager explaining that while it's disappointing that I didn't get the job, but it was such an honor to grovel and waste hours of my life to just be considered for such a prestigious position.

Actually, no, the worst part is the fact that I have to pretend to believe all these companies about their stupid mission statement, and how they're going to save the world. I can't be honest and say "I want a job because I want money in my bank account, and I'm hoping that if I perform labor for you that you will provide me that money", instead I have to make up some reason about how I think StylishlyMispelledCo is actually going to solve all the world's problems and that I want to be a part of the ground floor because I believe in <cause x>, and all the other companies working on <adjacent cause y> simply don't get it. Or I have to pretend that instead of hanging out with my wife or friends, I really want to hang out at a workplace that's more than just a workplace, but also a family.

I'm being unfair to startups, every company is doing this shit now. You can't just do a task because you want a paycheck, you have to launder it through some bullshit sanctimony about saving the world. That's how it was at Apple and Walmart at least.

It's demoralizing, but even worse, it's exhausting. I'm so frustrated with the world right now, and while I know that it certainly will get better eventually, I am also deeply unhappy with my life right now.

I hate the power imbalance that companies hold. I hate that these companies won't acknowledge that power imbalance, or the fact that deep down they're just greedy. I hate that I have to pay for my own healthcare out of pocket (or effectively out of pocket because the COBRA stuff I have is basically worthless). I hate that I got myself into this situation.

[SanjayMehta]

They lost the plot when they suddenly reduced the number of devices for the free tier.

There was a time when iCloud wasn't reliable. When that improved, Notes became a simpler free alternative.

[travelhead]

I invested $25,000 into buying secondary equity shares of Evernote about 1.5 years ago. In January, I got an exit check back for $120 bucks after the sale to Bending Spoon :/