I logged into Evernote the other day only to find I could no longer create new notes. I got this message when I tried.
They’ve been pestering me to upgrade to a paid account for months now, but there was never prior warning that there would be restrictions put in place if I didn’t comply. Pretty shady, if you ask me.
I guess they think it’s fine to just change things and let people know abruptly via the app AFTER said changes took affect. Pretty shitty way to treat people you’re hoping to turn into paying customers. It’s not exactly extortion, since the data is still accessible, but it’s also not the best way to entice people to get on board with a paid subscription either.
And of course the price is higher now than when they first started pestering me. Maybe if back then they’d have said “hey, if you do not upgrade, we’re going to lock your account down and you won’t be able to create any new notes if you already have over 50, or move existing notes around”, people might have paid more attention. I know I would have. But if they think I’m paying them $130 annually to use their service, they have another thing coming.
I immediately tried a new service called AnyType, but I didn’t care for it. Then GoogleKeep. Ditto. I already pay for Microsoft 360 so I thought I’d give OneNote another try even though it used to corrupt my notes almost daily many years ago when I used it at work. Doesn’t matter, though, because they changed the look of it and I hate that too.
In comes Notion. Very feature rich, free without note limitations, similar layout to Evernote. Great. Even has a way to pull your Evernote data into it. Well, that’s what they claim anyway. That process failed and after some investigation apparently there are certain notes in Evernote, namely those that contain tables, that cause issues, and for some reason this has been an issue for years with Notion without any resolution. Great. And since I couldn’t move those notes from one Notebook to another, since Evernote locked me out of that option, I was kinda stuck.
After trying for hours to figure out a way to get my Evernote data into Notion, I gave up. I found an app called Joplin that didn’t have issues with the import process. Sure, I still had to export my Evernote data for each notebook individually, then import into Joplin, but at least it worked!
Joplin is free, I use Dropbox as my database server, and there’s desktop and mobile versions of the app. It’s not quite as pretty as Evernote, nor have I yet found a way to mark certain notes as shortcuts in order to access them quickly, but my data is safe and I’m able to manipulate it how I want… for free.
Don’t get me wrong – I would have paid Evernote a reasonable price, but $10.83 per month is not reasonable for a note-taking app. I pay that for Photoshop and Lightroom!
Furthermore, I do not want to give my money to an underhanded company who pulled what they did. That company, Bending Spoons, has the appropriate initials – BS. Because that’s what they are full of, and they can go to hell for treating their users this way. And the Evernote bootlickers on Reddit calling us all whiny freeloaders for complaining can all go to hell as well.
Update 12/28/23 – Joplin is already driving me crazy due to how it stores & syncs data using Dropbox. I’m constantly getting notices from Dropbox’s desktop program about files being added/deleted (these are temporary files created by Joplin). I am probably going to subscribe to UpNote. I have been using the free version for a few days and it looks more like Evernote, plus has pinned notes which I like. It’s also affordable – $1 monthly or $30 for a lifetime subscription that they claim will be honored even if they move to a different subscription type in the future. It’s been around since 2017 so I think my data will be safe (plus I create weekly backups of this blog, my bookmarks, and my notes because I’m paranoid about losing stuff).