Evernote raised prices 200% and lost everyone's trust

When a company doubles prices and halves features, the product isn't being improved. It's being harvested.

Evernote's pricing history tells the story of a product being extracted from rather than invested in. The free plan once offered generous storage and sync across unlimited devices. Then it was limited to two devices. Then, after the Bending Spoons acquisition in 2022, the free tier was gutted to one notebook and fifty notes, a limit so restrictive it's effectively unusable. Paid plans roughly doubled in price. Features that were previously included became paywalled. The product that millions of people had trusted with a decade of their knowledge was being monetised through extraction rather than improvement.

The price increase might have been acceptable if it came with proportional improvement. Instead, it came alongside staff layoffs (roughly 250 employees), reduced support quality, and minimal product development. The combination sent a clear signal: the new owners were optimising for revenue extraction from an existing user base rather than investing in the product's future.

Why this matters beyond the money

The price increase is a symptom of a deeper problem: misaligned incentives between the company and its users. When a company's business model depends on the switching cost being higher than the dissatisfaction, the rational strategy is to extract maximum revenue while investing minimally in the product. The users stay not because the product is good but because leaving is painful.

This is the data ownership problem in its most concrete form. Users who stored a decade of notes in Evernote discovered that "their" data was effectively held hostage: not by a contractual clause but by the practical difficulty of exporting years of notes in a proprietary format and migrating them to a new system. The switching cost that felt like a minor inconvenience when the product was good became a trap when the product deteriorated.

The architectural lesson

The lesson isn't "don't use subscription software." It's "choose tools whose architecture protects you regardless of what the company does with its pricing."

Bring-your-own-storage means your data lives in your infrastructure. Price increases, acquisitions, strategic pivots, and product neglect don't affect your data because your data isn't in the company's custody. Open formats and API access mean you can move to a different tool without a painful migration. The tool earns your continued use through quality rather than through lock-in.

Fabric's pricing is transparent and includes AI in every plan. Your data is always exportable. Import your Evernote library and your notes become searchable by meaning, accessible to an AI assistant that knows your content, and stored in infrastructure you control.

Frequently asked questions

How much have Evernote's prices actually increased? The exact increases vary by plan and region, but paid plans have roughly doubled since the Bending Spoons acquisition. The free plan went from being usable (unlimited devices, decent storage) to being a demo (one notebook, fifty notes). The effective price increase for free users who needed to upgrade to maintain basic functionality was infinite.

Is Evernote going to increase prices again? There's no way to know, which is the point. When a company has demonstrated willingness to double prices and reduce features, the risk of further increases is real. Choosing a tool where your data is architecturally portable protects you regardless of what any company does with its pricing.

Can I import my Evernote notes to Fabric? Yes. Fabric supports importing from Evernote. Your notes, notebooks, and tags come across, and the content becomes searchable by meaning alongside everything else in your library.

What about Evernote's legacy features like web clipping and OCR? Fabric's web clipper replaces Evernote's, saving full page content (not just the URL) into your library. For PDF and image search, Fabric's semantic search indexes content within PDFs. OCR capabilities for handwritten content vary.

Is Fabric's pricing going to change the same way? No company can promise its pricing will never change. The architectural protection is that with bring-your-own-storage, your data lives in your infrastructure. If Fabric's pricing ever became unreasonable, your data would be in your S3 bucket, exportable and accessible, with no migration pain.

What makes Fabric's business model different? Fabric's architecture (bring-your-own-storage, open formats, API access, MCP compatibility) means users stay because the product is good, not because leaving is difficult. This aligns the business incentive with the user interest: the product has to keep earning your subscription through quality.

Should I leave Evernote now or wait? The switching cost grows with every note you add to Evernote, because each note is another piece of knowledge locked in a platform with uncertain trajectory. Starting the migration now means a smaller body of content to move and less accumulated dependence on a product that may continue to deteriorate.

What about the other Evernote alternatives? Apple Notes is simple but Apple-only. Obsidian is powerful but technical. Notion is flexible but requires maintenance. Fabric provides semantic search, AI, and automatic organisation with data ownership, which addresses the specific failures that drove people from Evernote.

Related reading: Why people are leaving Evernote, Migrating from Evernote, Evernote feels abandoned, Where does your knowledge live?. Related pages: Fabric vs Evernote, Best Evernote alternative, Importing to Fabric.