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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 s

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.

iamjasonlevin 3y ago
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TheMiddleMan 3y ago
Don't you think having so many competitors offering free notes apps is a large part of it?
- D13Fd 3y ago
  He gave the Obsidian example, which is a great one, so no. Obsidian shows you can still do well as a noted app company if you are selling the right thing (sync).
  - DeathArrow 3y ago
    But you can sync your Obsidian notes for free if you use free Dropbox or OneDrive accounts.
    - nullandvoid 3y ago
      This isn't trivial when you start syncing mobile (now you need an extra app, as onedrive doesn't support local), or onto a work device (where I don't want onedrive installed) There's work arounds (for example I forgot the name, but one plugin allows you to setup onedrive to share just one folder via logging in on each device), but the syncing story wasn't great. Quite a bit of extra setup across all devices, more points of failure etc. Hence the smart business model, of let us handle it for you for a small cost.
      - da5is 3y ago
        There's an Obisidian plugin for direct syncing to OneDrive that works on both mobile and desktop - this keeps you from having to deal with either triggered syncs through github or the various other, painful syncing processes. https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save
bachmeier 3y ago
> 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-raised-prices-got-more-of-us-to-sign-up/ 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.
- briHass 3y ago
  If you're on Windows, OneNote is almost impossible to compete with. Even though it's part of the Office suite, it's a free, stand-alone download. The phone apps are free, and you get 5GB of free storage. Then, for less than the cost of Evernote, you can get a O365 subscription and get the Office suite and 1TB of storage. Even though OneNote is basically a loss-leader, it's extremely powerful and flexible. It's been around longer than any other note-app, and it's still here as Evernote fades into oblivion.
  - killjoywashere 3y ago
    I have tried to use oneNote a few times and it just doesn’t not compute to me. Some union of Notability + Paperpile would be perfect. I review proposals, peer review manuscripts, and read papers for my own research, all done with notes take with the handwritten scribble function over a PDF (which Evernote never got right). I have friends with OneNote and no matter what they explain, it does not make sense to me.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      I was on your shoes around 2014 to 2018. The client I was assigned to, used for everything on project management related documentation. I couldn't understand how to approach it. Then around 2019, in another project it suddenly made sense, after several approaches trying to make sense out of it.
weare138 3y ago
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?
- proamdev123 3y ago
  It works when the free tier is usable, but highly limited. Then it effectively becomes a free trial, albeit with no time restriction. For example, if Evernote had limited the free tier to 99 notes and syncing with 2 devices. That’s usable enough for a user to get a feel for whether they like it or not, but without an expectation that the free tier could support all their needs for note generation and storage. The problem comes when the free tier is so restraint-free that people begin to use it as a daily driver without ever expecting to upgrade to a paid tier. At that point, the company has boxed themselves into a situation with users who generate costs but no corresponding revenues. Trying to convert _those_ users into paying customers is difficult or impossible, in my opinion.
PhoenixReborn 3y ago
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.
- greggsy 3y ago
  They created a very robust platform based on a cross-platform framework (electron) with a healthy stable of open source add ons, and held off n a major release for some time. They really only need to water and feed it from there.
- itsjloh 3y ago
  Have Obsidian taken on any VC funding?
  - coffeeling 3y ago
    They've intentionally avoided taking on any.
- bakuninsbart 3y ago
  I think this is the key issue here. There are a lot of VC funded start ups that have a good product and a solid market fit, but they were never supposed to become 500+ employee companies. If you have a product that works and makes a good profit, and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5 more, sometimes that just is the company. In this context I think it is important to note that Ycombinator was founded in 2005. For the majority of its existence, and the general hype of tech startups, money was incredibly cheap. Now that the gears are switching, a lot of the advice given to startup founders does not work as well anymore.
  - Kaibeezy 3y ago
    If you have a product that works and makes a good profit, and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5 more, sometimes that just is the company. Amen. I call this business model “tiny unicorn”. Been riding mine 25 years now.
kdazzle 3y ago
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.
- LVB 3y ago
  I've used https://getrocketbook.com https://getrocketbook.com somewhat recently. Supports Evernote and other cloud services too.
- deleted 3y ago
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janxgeist 3y ago
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.
- tempestn 3y ago
  Exactly. I would have happily paid them 10 bucks a month in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars forever if they'd just maintained the apps and kept them up to date. Instead they focused on adding features few people wanted, and then completely rewrote the apps in Electron, resulting in a slow experience that was (and still is, years later) missing multiple core note-taking features, and is increasingly unreliable. I kept hoping, as theoretically Evernote is absolutely perfect for my needs, if it would just work. But clearly the writing is on the wall at this point and I need to find an alternative.
  - kerrsclyde 3y ago
    Same here. I'm still using version 7 of their desktop software on OS X, now badged Legacy. It's fantastic, fast, multiple tabs (unlike the new Evernote app!!!), OCR, works well with images/PDF/Office Docs, I've never had a problem with syncing, I can format notes as I wish etc, etc. Over the past 10 days it has started displaying a daily upgrade message forcing me to the new tab-less Electron app. I'm resisting but I've no doubt it will stop syncing any day. Much of my daily workflow is focused around Evernote. It's going to a pain to move but I am going to. If they'd have just left things alone I would have been a paying customer probably until my dying day.
    - gotofritz 3y ago
      The legacy app is absolutely NOT fast if you have a significant amount of notes. Still worth using because the current app simply lacks the functionality (they "solved" the costantly freezing problem by preventing people from selecting more than 50 notes at once, for example). But certainly not fast
srvmshr 3y ago
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.
- puszczyk 3y ago
  No the OP. I think Notion targets SMBs and maybe teams within enterprises. When they started the personal plan was paid (after first 1k blocks or so), then in 2020 they’ve lifted that restriction[0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236786
- randomdata 3y ago
  Are they really in the same segment? Evernote's killer feature was its ability to "scan" paper documents with a smartphone and to be able to search on those documents in the future. Notion is just a Markdown editor.
- belthesar 3y ago
  It's hard to say. In a lot of ways, they can address the same market, but from different directions. Evernote is a single-user focused app that extended to collaborative notetaking, Notion is a knowledge base app that can be used by individuals. The market is different, and Notion has always had a present limitation of how much a free account can get away with, even if it is generous. There's a pretty stark difference in saying "have the whole enchilada for free" at first and then "now we're limiting the devices you can sync to" or "now these other features you had are no longer free", vs. "your usage is always metered, and there is a generous free tier". I do imagine there is some sense in that if the free tier threshold was reduced that would cause some pain, but setting the expectation of "lunch is free, all you can eat" and then pivoting to "lunch is still mostly free but now you have to pay for desert" is going to make anyone mad that they have to pay for dessert now.
ramraj07 3y ago
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.
- devjab 3y ago
  I think you’re both right because the original poster left out competition. It’s one thing to take free back, it’s another thing to do it when people can easily replace your product without paying. Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use. At least as far as I know. You can get your disk space in a lot of ways, some bundled with other products you may use making it appear “free” but even if you host your own cloud storage you’re going to pay something for it. Even if Evernote is better than notes on your iPhone, is it $10 a month better? Probably not.
  - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
    > Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use Google drive?
    - TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
      It is only matter of time before Google will kill it.
    - nunodonato 3y ago
      where's the linux client?
    - devjab 3y ago
      How is Google drive more free to use than Dropbox? As soon as you need any sort of storage it’ll cost you money. You can also get some free MBs from Microsoft, Proton and so on, and, Dropbox also has a free tier.
      - 3y ago
arbitrary_name 3y ago
I cannot stand how difficult it is to create, use, and copy/paste tables. It means I'm forced to stick with OneNote.
ilyt 3y ago
> 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
DeathArrow 3y ago
> 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?
- belthesar 3y ago
  It sounds like that I didn't explain myself super well, because we agree. Using Dropbox or OneDrive to do sync is still owning the sync story yourself. You may not be writing the file syncing software, but you're not using Obsidian's purpose built sync system.
prepend 3y ago
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.
- Euphorbium 3y ago
  Apple notes does exactly the same and free.
- neilv 3y ago
  > I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. For the owners/shareholders of that particular 1-2 person company, do they wish it had stayed one, or are they glad it didn't?
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    Good question which can only be answered by them. But given the amount of money they raised compared to their likely acquisition price (bending spoons has only raise slightly more capital to buy all the apps they are buying than evernote did for its development), I don't think they've walked away with much financially.
    - CoffeeOnWrite 3y ago
      Yep. For the founders in particular though, who had the most influence early on in taking the VC path, odds are they took some money out along the way, perhaps quite a bit more than had they stayed small.
stevage 3y ago
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.
- proamdev123 3y ago
  Evernote’s files are `.enex` which is a variation of html. At least, they used to be. I haven’t checked recently, but this was the case for many years. Don’t know if they’ve changed anything recently.
  - mesoman 3y ago
    If you export it, you get XML, with embedded HTML in <CDATA TAGS, among other things. But the point is the same - it's not hard to parse. It also has base64 encoded images and pdf's. Don't know what else.
deelly 3y ago
> 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..
seanhunter 3y ago
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.
- pphysch 3y ago
  I set up Obsidian+Syncthing on my desktop+mobile devices a couple years ago and have had zero technical issues, while Obsidian has significantly improved their product since, IME. It just works AND I own my data. It's a real gem among mountains of SaaS/VC nonsense.
- infinitemh 3y ago
  I just started using Obsidian and I use the vim keybinds that Obsidian ships with. My only issue so far is I can’t move the cursor back to the title from the body.
ergonaught 3y ago
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.
- mesoman 3y ago
  I'm still a paying customer. But I don't trust them and haven't since they made it difficult to export all of your notes. And, they damaged tag-based organization by changing to only list notes that are at the bottom of the tag hierarchy - not those in the middle. And, they want to be the sole custodian my data, and I don't like a company with that attitude. Having been involved with system design including large servers for 50 years, I don't trust the cloud. Yeah, the huge cloud providers are staffed by really smart people and it is very unlikely you'll lose your data there (although I sure wouldn't trust Google - they're nuts with their product management). But a small staff Evernote, under pressure to please investors by somehow adding features that will let them compete in spaces already pretty full - no, I don't trust them to adequately use the cloud to keep my data secure. I do frequent .enex backups of all my notes. I haven't switched yet, because it's a pain. But I sure do backups frequently. And if I see a good alternative (maybe in this thread), I'll jump on it. As long as I don't have to do the sysadmin all the time (I'd forget - busy with other things, or I'd make some dumb mistake); and as long as it isn't a giant pain to install and build. And as long as it has clients for MacOS (including Apple ARM processors), Android and iOS... then I'll look. Ideas sought. The last time I did this search (2020), I didn't find one I liked.
acumenical 3y ago
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.
wpietri 3y ago
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.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
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.

iamjasonlevin 3y ago

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TheMiddleMan 3y ago

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

D13Fd 3y ago
He gave the Obsidian example, which is a great one, so no. Obsidian shows you can still do well as a noted app company if you are selling the right thing (sync).
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  But you can sync your Obsidian notes for free if you use free Dropbox or OneDrive accounts.
  - nullandvoid 3y ago
    This isn't trivial when you start syncing mobile (now you need an extra app, as onedrive doesn't support local), or onto a work device (where I don't want onedrive installed) There's work arounds (for example I forgot the name, but one plugin allows you to setup onedrive to share just one folder via logging in on each device), but the syncing story wasn't great. Quite a bit of extra setup across all devices, more points of failure etc. Hence the smart business model, of let us handle it for you for a small cost.
    - da5is 3y ago
      There's an Obisidian plugin for direct syncing to OneDrive that works on both mobile and desktop - this keeps you from having to deal with either triggered syncs through github or the various other, painful syncing processes. https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save

bachmeier 3y ago

> 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-raised-prices-got-more-of-us-to-sign-up/ 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.

briHass 3y ago
If you're on Windows, OneNote is almost impossible to compete with. Even though it's part of the Office suite, it's a free, stand-alone download. The phone apps are free, and you get 5GB of free storage. Then, for less than the cost of Evernote, you can get a O365 subscription and get the Office suite and 1TB of storage. Even though OneNote is basically a loss-leader, it's extremely powerful and flexible. It's been around longer than any other note-app, and it's still here as Evernote fades into oblivion.
- killjoywashere 3y ago
  I have tried to use oneNote a few times and it just doesn’t not compute to me. Some union of Notability + Paperpile would be perfect. I review proposals, peer review manuscripts, and read papers for my own research, all done with notes take with the handwritten scribble function over a PDF (which Evernote never got right). I have friends with OneNote and no matter what they explain, it does not make sense to me.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    I was on your shoes around 2014 to 2018. The client I was assigned to, used for everything on project management related documentation. I couldn't understand how to approach it. Then around 2019, in another project it suddenly made sense, after several approaches trying to make sense out of it.

weare138 3y ago

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?

proamdev123 3y ago
It works when the free tier is usable, but highly limited. Then it effectively becomes a free trial, albeit with no time restriction. For example, if Evernote had limited the free tier to 99 notes and syncing with 2 devices. That’s usable enough for a user to get a feel for whether they like it or not, but without an expectation that the free tier could support all their needs for note generation and storage. The problem comes when the free tier is so restraint-free that people begin to use it as a daily driver without ever expecting to upgrade to a paid tier. At that point, the company has boxed themselves into a situation with users who generate costs but no corresponding revenues. Trying to convert _those_ users into paying customers is difficult or impossible, in my opinion.

PhoenixReborn 3y ago

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.

greggsy 3y ago
They created a very robust platform based on a cross-platform framework (electron) with a healthy stable of open source add ons, and held off n a major release for some time. They really only need to water and feed it from there.
itsjloh 3y ago
Have Obsidian taken on any VC funding?
- coffeeling 3y ago
  They've intentionally avoided taking on any.
bakuninsbart 3y ago
I think this is the key issue here. There are a lot of VC funded start ups that have a good product and a solid market fit, but they were never supposed to become 500+ employee companies. If you have a product that works and makes a good profit, and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5 more, sometimes that just is the company. In this context I think it is important to note that Ycombinator was founded in 2005. For the majority of its existence, and the general hype of tech startups, money was incredibly cheap. Now that the gears are switching, a lot of the advice given to startup founders does not work as well anymore.
- Kaibeezy 3y ago
  If you have a product that works and makes a good profit, and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5 more, sometimes that just is the company. Amen. I call this business model “tiny unicorn”. Been riding mine 25 years now.

kdazzle 3y ago

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.

LVB 3y ago
I've used https://getrocketbook.com https://getrocketbook.com somewhat recently. Supports Evernote and other cloud services too.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

janxgeist 3y ago

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.

tempestn 3y ago
Exactly. I would have happily paid them 10 bucks a month in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars forever if they'd just maintained the apps and kept them up to date. Instead they focused on adding features few people wanted, and then completely rewrote the apps in Electron, resulting in a slow experience that was (and still is, years later) missing multiple core note-taking features, and is increasingly unreliable. I kept hoping, as theoretically Evernote is absolutely perfect for my needs, if it would just work. But clearly the writing is on the wall at this point and I need to find an alternative.
- kerrsclyde 3y ago
  Same here. I'm still using version 7 of their desktop software on OS X, now badged Legacy. It's fantastic, fast, multiple tabs (unlike the new Evernote app!!!), OCR, works well with images/PDF/Office Docs, I've never had a problem with syncing, I can format notes as I wish etc, etc. Over the past 10 days it has started displaying a daily upgrade message forcing me to the new tab-less Electron app. I'm resisting but I've no doubt it will stop syncing any day. Much of my daily workflow is focused around Evernote. It's going to a pain to move but I am going to. If they'd have just left things alone I would have been a paying customer probably until my dying day.
  - gotofritz 3y ago
    The legacy app is absolutely NOT fast if you have a significant amount of notes. Still worth using because the current app simply lacks the functionality (they "solved" the costantly freezing problem by preventing people from selecting more than 50 notes at once, for example). But certainly not fast

srvmshr 3y ago

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.

puszczyk 3y ago
No the OP. I think Notion targets SMBs and maybe teams within enterprises. When they started the personal plan was paid (after first 1k blocks or so), then in 2020 they’ve lifted that restriction[0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236786
randomdata 3y ago
Are they really in the same segment? Evernote's killer feature was its ability to "scan" paper documents with a smartphone and to be able to search on those documents in the future. Notion is just a Markdown editor.
belthesar 3y ago
It's hard to say. In a lot of ways, they can address the same market, but from different directions. Evernote is a single-user focused app that extended to collaborative notetaking, Notion is a knowledge base app that can be used by individuals. The market is different, and Notion has always had a present limitation of how much a free account can get away with, even if it is generous. There's a pretty stark difference in saying "have the whole enchilada for free" at first and then "now we're limiting the devices you can sync to" or "now these other features you had are no longer free", vs. "your usage is always metered, and there is a generous free tier". I do imagine there is some sense in that if the free tier threshold was reduced that would cause some pain, but setting the expectation of "lunch is free, all you can eat" and then pivoting to "lunch is still mostly free but now you have to pay for desert" is going to make anyone mad that they have to pay for dessert now.

ramraj07 3y ago

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.

devjab 3y ago
I think you’re both right because the original poster left out competition. It’s one thing to take free back, it’s another thing to do it when people can easily replace your product without paying. Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use. At least as far as I know. You can get your disk space in a lot of ways, some bundled with other products you may use making it appear “free” but even if you host your own cloud storage you’re going to pay something for it. Even if Evernote is better than notes on your iPhone, is it $10 a month better? Probably not.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
  > Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use Google drive?
  - TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
    It is only matter of time before Google will kill it.
  - nunodonato 3y ago
    where's the linux client?
  - devjab 3y ago
    How is Google drive more free to use than Dropbox? As soon as you need any sort of storage it’ll cost you money. You can also get some free MBs from Microsoft, Proton and so on, and, Dropbox also has a free tier.
    - 3y ago

arbitrary_name 3y ago

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

ilyt 3y ago

> 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

DeathArrow 3y ago

> 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?

belthesar 3y ago
It sounds like that I didn't explain myself super well, because we agree. Using Dropbox or OneDrive to do sync is still owning the sync story yourself. You may not be writing the file syncing software, but you're not using Obsidian's purpose built sync system.

prepend 3y ago

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.

Euphorbium 3y ago
Apple notes does exactly the same and free.
neilv 3y ago
> I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. For the owners/shareholders of that particular 1-2 person company, do they wish it had stayed one, or are they glad it didn't?
- rcxdude 3y ago
  Good question which can only be answered by them. But given the amount of money they raised compared to their likely acquisition price (bending spoons has only raise slightly more capital to buy all the apps they are buying than evernote did for its development), I don't think they've walked away with much financially.
  - CoffeeOnWrite 3y ago
    Yep. For the founders in particular though, who had the most influence early on in taking the VC path, odds are they took some money out along the way, perhaps quite a bit more than had they stayed small.

stevage 3y ago

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.

proamdev123 3y ago
Evernote’s files are `.enex` which is a variation of html. At least, they used to be. I haven’t checked recently, but this was the case for many years. Don’t know if they’ve changed anything recently.
- mesoman 3y ago
  If you export it, you get XML, with embedded HTML in <CDATA TAGS, among other things. But the point is the same - it's not hard to parse. It also has base64 encoded images and pdf's. Don't know what else.

deelly 3y ago

> 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..

seanhunter 3y ago

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.

pphysch 3y ago
I set up Obsidian+Syncthing on my desktop+mobile devices a couple years ago and have had zero technical issues, while Obsidian has significantly improved their product since, IME. It just works AND I own my data. It's a real gem among mountains of SaaS/VC nonsense.
infinitemh 3y ago
I just started using Obsidian and I use the vim keybinds that Obsidian ships with. My only issue so far is I can’t move the cursor back to the title from the body.

ergonaught 3y ago

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.

mesoman 3y ago
I'm still a paying customer. But I don't trust them and haven't since they made it difficult to export all of your notes. And, they damaged tag-based organization by changing to only list notes that are at the bottom of the tag hierarchy - not those in the middle. And, they want to be the sole custodian my data, and I don't like a company with that attitude. Having been involved with system design including large servers for 50 years, I don't trust the cloud. Yeah, the huge cloud providers are staffed by really smart people and it is very unlikely you'll lose your data there (although I sure wouldn't trust Google - they're nuts with their product management). But a small staff Evernote, under pressure to please investors by somehow adding features that will let them compete in spaces already pretty full - no, I don't trust them to adequately use the cloud to keep my data secure. I do frequent .enex backups of all my notes. I haven't switched yet, because it's a pain. But I sure do backups frequently. And if I see a good alternative (maybe in this thread), I'll jump on it. As long as I don't have to do the sysadmin all the time (I'd forget - busy with other things, or I'd make some dumb mistake); and as long as it isn't a giant pain to install and build. And as long as it has clients for MacOS (including Apple ARM processors), Android and iOS... then I'll look. Ideas sought. The last time I did this search (2020), I didn't find one I liked.

acumenical 3y ago

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.

wpietri 3y ago

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.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

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.