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Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
1025 points by baron816 on July 6, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 614 comments
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.




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.


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.


> 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.

This is the problem with most VC funded startups. You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees. When it comes time to actually make a profit, these companies struggle because the value proposition simply isn't there for what they're offering.

Take GrubHub and DoorDash for example. Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction? No. But someone has to pay back the billions spent on useless corporate bloat and thousands of employees.


> This is the problem with most VC funded startups.

At one level I shouldn't care. The VCs burn the money, the users make a bad choice to rely on something that will inevitably disappear when the profit-seeking crunch comes, not my problem.

But it's unfortunately for all of us because all this human energy (from users, developers) that gets wasted over and over on doomed-to-fail proprietary solutions could be so much better spent on developing, using and promoting open source distributed solutions that can stand the test of time.


On the other hand they’re paying us handsomely to tilt at these particular windmills.


Yeah true. Being laid off sucks, but let's just say a few friends I had at Twitter are taking a very nice vacation with no rush to start re-applying. Can't be said about most non-tech jobs experiencing layoffs.


> Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction? No.

To be fair, it’s only “an ordering system” if you look purely at pick-up ordering. For deliveries, these apps are two-sided real-time resource schedulers (allocating a driver to N orders they can efficiently deliver through pickups and drop offs on a single precalculated connecting route to optimize both time and fuel consumption.) The value is in the backend software, as the very same backend software should be reusable for e.g. routing driverless taxis.


I interviewed at doordash, they really pride themselves on being able to optimize when a driver gets to the place to get the order to maximize everyone's time and not have useless waiting. It's NOT an easy problem and they had a huge prediction engine per store/item.

Looking at problems naively it looks simple but it's -really- not that simple if you want it to do WELL.


> Take GrubHub and DoorDash for example. Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction?

While I agree with the sentiment, it is worth noting that the 30% helps cover the delivery-person’s cut. Ideally, there should be a fixed cost courier charge, but that’s tangential to the point here.


In general I would agree but the hardest part of any success is getting the word out there.

Especially for double-sided markets like food delivery where you have a chicken and egg problem - why providers sign up when there aren’t users and why would users sign up when there aren’t any providers.

That’s a human problem, not a technical one, and is the expensive bit.


> You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees.

You are just looking at the tip of the iceberg. Being essentially a CRUD app doesn’t mean it is less complex than other software. This is similar to saying “Facebook is just a web site, I could make that over a weekend.”


That is repeatedly said about twitter and reddit


I agree that many of the features they were adding were useless (to me), but I disagree that you can encompass what they do with the description of storing and editing files. Their value was in the removing any concern a user might have about where a note is, both in terms of which device, and where on the device. There are a bunch of ways to sync and edit files, but I don't want to spend time or brain power on that, I want to capture bits of information and then be able to find it again without thinking about it. What I was buying was simplicity, reliability, ubiquity, and speed. They screwed up because they didn't seem to realize that was their core value proposition.


I feel like something more subtle was at work too. Much of my Evernote uses were just clipping Web pages to save for later or organize and search later and at some point I no longer did that. Why not? Well, I can take a few guesses. I graduated from college, for one. But also, I started reading more things on mobile devices, which didn’t nicely integrate with the clipping tool. Probably I now spend more time on social media sites than reading articles on random sites. Maybe it just got to be less trendy and exciting. I don’t remember any particular change to Evernote that made me drift away from using it.

When it comes to pure “notes” I find either Google Keep or Apple Notes are good enough and work with less effort on my part so that’s where most of my scribbles go.


>There are a bunch of ways to sync and edit files, but I don't want to spend time or brain power on that

I see what you mean. But at the same time I do have the brainpower to simply remember to save my notes into the "notes" folder, which I then sync into some cloud storage.

Or even just use Google Keep. I'm fine pasting links, copying pictures, and jotting quick notes down. I didn't necessarily need inking support on my end. Condolances to those who did, as well as other features like audio and others I can't remember off the top of my head.


> 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?


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.


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.


Sounds like perverse incentives? If your best coarse is to ruin your company and product to make a buck, you may as well be a telemarketing scammer or some other vulture of society that make bank off the mystery/rent seeking of others.

I have to hope that the original owners really wanted to make the best product possible and lost their heads with the power to create that they thought the investments would bring.


Theoretically it aligns the incentives of the founders with those of the VCs putting new money into the round (eg the founders are OK with the company taking more risk, because they have diversified their personal net worth somewhat). Now, the incentives of the VCs putting new money into the round, there's certainly an argument that they don't always benefit society or deliver the best possible product...


Is this typically possible? My understanding is that most VCs insist on being paid first in the case of an exit, at least to the point of getting back what they put in. Founders and employees are typically last in the line.


Yes, during the rounds where VCs are stepping over themselves to invest, founders can negotiate terms that permit them (and their employees and early investors) to sell some of their stock as part of the deal, in a secondary sale (https://rizstanford.medium.com/secondary-sales-in-vc-backed-...).


Either way, it's poisoning the well. It's a shame that many (most?) SaaS applications lack data portability. I get that part of it is it's easier to have a custom schema than adhere to an established file format (or creating a new open format). The cynic in me believes a lot of it is good old-fashioned lock-in or casual indifference to their customers' data.

That's may even be fine for some bits of data. But, for anything I want access to long-term, I just can't trust SaaS start-ups anymore. Very few acquisitions end up with a favorable outcome for the customers. Sometimes the service gets unceremoniously shut down. In other cases the app gets folded in to some other product the parent company owns. In yet others the product suffers as the parent company tries to squeeze what it can from the existing consumer base.

I have no real interest in trying to scrape my data out of a vault so I can recreate it elsewhere. Increasingly, I limit my choices to established players with a history of long-term product support (e.g., Apple or Microsoft, but not Google) or OSS. I'm sure in the short-term I'm missing out on new functionality that could increase my productivity, but I don't like the anxiety of knowing I could lose all my data in an instant and so I don't truly engage with such products. My primary concern is no longer than the company will go out of business but rather that they'll try to shoehorn a growth model that doesn't make sense for the core product so they can then sell and sail off into the sunset.

Obsidian is an interesting case where's it's not an established company and it's not OSS, but they've made it possible for you to ensure long-term access to your data. If needed, there could be an OSS-equivalent of Obsidian to read those files. But, I'm happy to just pay them for a good product. If they were to have a big exit, that's great for them and I don't think I'd be impacted very much.

The trend in software has been a move to walled gardens and there's been strong adoption there, so I don't think my mindset on the topic is a prevailing opinion. But, I have noticed family members and such have grown increasingly tired of service shutdowns from acquisitions. Expensive devices become bricks. Important data goes away. Etc.


I think that's a good point.

A common tactic now is to have this idea of lock-in. That if you don't continue to use said service you loose everything. This forces you into that subscription and makes it extremely hard to transfer and move.

I have seen many apps that lock data export behind enterprise subscriptions - that have no pricing and only "contact us".

I do think there are times it may make sense to have some unique file format (maybe your app does something special and needs that format) but there should always be a way to get that data into something more standard. Whether that's a text file, a CSV file or something else.


Apple is not a company I would trust with long term product support, at least at the pro end. It has dropped several products. I used to use Aperture, for instance, which was a great pro photography product, but it was dropped with no real exit route.

Obsidian: also worth looking at DEVONthink for similar reasons, but with the advantage that you have a choice of sync services including running your own. The database is open, but a risk point is that it uses RTFD for notes with graphics. That's not supported off the Apple platform, but there are similar risks with any method of storing notes with graphics.


> Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having an app to easily edit those files is super cheap.

Are Evernote files just plain "text files"?


Part of their problem is that they aren’t.

But they should be just text files with pointers to non-text things.

Creating a proprietary format just because is an unnecessary complexity and cost.

I used Evernote for 5-10 years and had thousands of notes. I had maybe 10-20 photographs or diagrams mixed in, but mostly it was text.

Not sure how common my use is, but they kept adding stuff I didn’t want. And it’s now a “free” feature in Apple notes, onenote and countless others.

I think the difference is that Microsoft and Apple are just trying to find efficient ways to store data in their cloud storage. Evernote was trying to find ways to make customers pay for note taking.


No. But I’ve pretty much always come back to storing text files, photos, and PDFs. It may not be as elegant a solution but it’s completely portable. Never got into OneNote when I used to use Windows for the same reason.


I've been burned by 3rd party formats - never again - plain text for me.


You can export your notes as HTML, or better, .enex files. The latter are XML, with embedded stuff encoded with base64.


Apple notes does exactly the same and free.


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.


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.


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.


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


Electron is the single biggest scourge to end users since Windows ME.


That was what killed it for me. After they rewrote in Electron, using the app always felt sluggish, and despite the fact that it didn't actually interfere with any of my uses of it, I went from really liking their service to tolerating it as the lesser of several evils.


I'm not sure whether electron itself is bad, or if it's the fact that any company who would use it has made an executive decision to cut corners and sacrifice user happiness for development velocity (Microsoft/VS Code excepted, mostly). Any such company would put out a bad product no matter what. Electron might just be the common subpar solution that these types of companies all gravitate towards; without it, they'd probably still build bad apps, but in a million different frameworks instead of just one.


Is it really though? I feel like it’s allowing many clients to exist that otherwise wouldn’t ever get written.


I see your a quantity over quality type.

Electron is a great tool tbh, I'm not on the hate train, but let's not pretend like electron is some bastion of quality or performance. People's grievances are legitimate, and part of that reason is just how low the bar is to ship something with it. Great for tinkerers, but sours normal users.


I can remember a lot of applications just not being available on Linux or Mac and you just had to suck it up. An Electron app beats that. And it’s not like Java UI apps were so much sleeker.


Don't know about ME, but I have many native apps on my Mac, and it's jarring when switching to any electron app. It's always janky.


Isn't Notion an Electron app or just a webapp?


Fastmail is an excellent example of a very reliable, slow changing product with a consistent price. I’ve been a subscriber for over 20 years, and I’m thrilled that it hardly ever changes in perceptible ways and just does it’s job. In more recent years, they have started to introduce some changes but seem very careful about it.


I paid for a subscription because I really liked what it did and I used it a lot. The Android app became so unresponsive that it was basically unusable. I stopped paying when I found myself making notes in email again to avoid opening the treacly app.

It has since got better but I haven't gone back to paying for it, despite using it a lot, and now I'll probably slowly migrate away as they progressively break and disable the free version.


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.


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.


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.


What would be the caveats of that approach?


You’ve go to know your unicorn. If it’s tiny, it’s tiny, and no use dreaming of a majestic stallion rampant when its natural environment is scuttling under the clover.


Great answer! I shall ride this pony until the wheels fall off then.


This is super-important. Sometimes the grass is greener on this side of the fence.

VCs want to get you to grow rapidly because the only way to move the needle on their returns is to blow the roof off. However as a founder, this is proof you can have a great business and a great quality of life by keeping costs relatively low, the team relatively small, just cranking out code and having fun.


As a founder you probably don’t get wealthy either and a lot aren’t really satisfied with a $150k/yr total comp/benefits for their successful lifestyle business.


As a co-founder, I'd say you can get wealthy or at least comfortable.

But, we started with two people. At some point we needed funding. That put us on a track of angel investors, VC's, and a cycle acquisition, buyback, funding, acquisition, buyback, etc.

As the techie guy, I found that tiring and distracting. When we changed from software as a product to SAAS, it got a lot less fun. When we grew to 2000 employees (mostly non-tech), the company was a pain.

So after 20 years (to the day), we sold it and moved on.


It's really nice to hear something like that from someone who experienced it.

If you were back to two people with a promising idea, how would you do it this time?


It was pretty nice to exit my startup for hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, I don’t think I’d like to settle for $150k. YMMV, but I suppose a lot of folks are taking a calculated risk and swinging for the fences.

More power to em, if you prefer software be a certain way write it yourself.


Agreed, sure I fucked over my customers after my startup was bought by Google, but I didn't really care because I was able to afford three yachts. I didn't even bother writing the shutdown message myself, I paid some dude on Fiverr to do it. Maybe 150k is fine if you're willing to settle for an above-ground pool in some shithole state in the Midwest, but if you want to spend your time where the true work happens, and collaborate with other innovators and founders in the only place that matters (bay area) you have to set your sights a bit higher.


Humans have agency. If you enter into an agreement for software at a particular price (especially $0) that’s on you.


Imagine not being "satisfied" with a ~85th percentile wage[1]. Anyone who earns more than $150k/yr should be forced to spend 6 months every 5 years working a minimum wage retail job. They can keep earning their normal salary in escrow until they're done with their "get some damn perspective" temp job.

[1] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen...


I assume someone running a very successful lifestyle business of this sort 1) Probably had a pretty good chance of making nothing at all or even lost money and 2) Could make more money with benefits etc. if they just took a job at a big company.

So, yes, they’ve done pretty well but they took a risk and still probably didn’t come close to maximizing comp even they had a rather good outcome.

And I just threw out the $150k number because it’s a very good outcome. Could just as easily be something a lot lower including negative.


While I do agree it would be good for those who haven't experienced poverty to get a taste of it, it's not realistic to expect people to feel satisfied simply because they are more fortunate than some other group. Success is always perceived relative to your surroundings and the possibilities available.


> Imagine not being "satisfied" with a ~85th percentile wage.

In aggregates: Household income > individual income > wage/salary; you've confused the first with the last.

$150K is beyond 90th percentile individual income. [0] I can’t find wage/salary percentiles separately, but its probably even further beyond 90th percentile there.

https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-perce...


I think most of the founders on HN are far above the 85th percentile in intelligence (let's not get into the philosophical arguments about it), so why would they be satisfied with that?


Because, being over 85th percentile in intelligence, they would be more likely than average to realize that the marginal impact of income on experienced utility declines sharply the higher you go on the income distribution. (Especially if they’ve experienced life at a variety of income levels, including some near the 85th percentile.)


Marginal impact decreases, but the absolute impact is still positive... And the marginal impact is still quite high at the 85th percentile of income because the income distribution is very skewed (the absolute dollar difference from 85th percentile to 99th percentile, where most HN / YC founders probably are on the intelligence scale, is probably much greater than the absolute dollar difference from 15th to 29th percentile, as an example).


You can make A LOT more money than that as the owner of a small company. If a VC firm wants to invest, it's because the company has the potential to make an absolute killing.


I'd like to agree with you, but the issue then becomes this smaller company is competing with a much larger company, which then has a larger marketing budget. The smaller company's offering becomes just another set of features the larger company offers.

It's not fair because the larger company continues to get VC funding which allows it to subsidize features or even give them away for free. Remember, all these companies are effectively racing to become monopolies and part of that process is "price dumping" to kill of smaller competitors. Again, this sucks, but those are the incentives VCs provides and companies have to oblige or get swallowed up by bigger fish.


> 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.

C'mon now. With that attitude, how are you ever going to get imploded on top of the Titanic, or buy a social media company so you can smash it against the wall like a toddler with a toy truck? You want to live a comfortable, happy life, with happy employees and customers? No way! This is capitalism, baby! Fuck your customers and your employees, it's your right to throw them into a vat of acid so you can blow millions of their dollars to spend 30 minutes in the stratosphere wearing a cowboy hat! If you don't do it, someone else will!


Yeah! I feel like I'm reading a script of an episode of the TV show, "Silicon Valley"! (ANY episode, lol!) * Pied Piper FOREVER! *


The count depends on if you include the cat: https://obsidian.md/about


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.


Have Obsidian taken on any VC funding?


They've intentionally avoided taking on any.


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.


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.


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.


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?


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.


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.


Dropbox never took away anything they gave for free though. In the beginning they handed out extra space like candies, and the accounts that got it at the time still have it.


They did though. You used to have unlimited devices syncing for free, then they took that away and made it 3 unless paid.

It's why I ended up switching to OneDrive. (Which I ended up paying for later.)


I dropped Dropbox with extreme prejudice (was a paying customer) when they decided to dictate which Linux filesystems I may use. Will never use them ever again. Randomly demanding I drop everything and re-engineer my stack is an invitation for me to re-engineer them out of my life.


Like everyone else, they have to decide what they support – their core product pretty heavily depends on known file system semantics – and they gave advanced notice specifically so you didn’t have to “drop everything” if you for some reason cannot have a partition using a supported file system.

Put another way, do you think the combined users of file systems which aren’t supported ext4, xfs, btrfs, or zfs are willing to pay more or would quietly accept the possibility of data loss? I doubt the former is true and have absolute certainty that if there was a bug using an unsupported file system that would result in angry, hyperbolic blog posts saying Dropbox is unsafe and will lose your data.


Oh are those all supported now? They've clearly backtracked massively. When I bounced they were insisting on ext4 only. Glad I didn't bother rebuild all my machines to ext4 only for them to change their damn minds. They gave us less than three months notice. I'm not playing chicken for three months paying their professional tier in the hopes they change their mind. Freaking circus.


> when they decided to dictate which Linux filesystems I may use

That’s an odd framing. How about “when they didn’t support the filesystem I use”?

If some software is only available on Windows I doubt anyone would say that the vendor is trying to “dictate what OS I use”.


The framing is not odd at all. Your framing makes it sound as if this was some requirement that had been known since the beginning rather than the typical "Good news! For our own corporate reasons we have decided to make your life better by jumping to the top of your todo list and breaking your things!" Thanks, I hate it.

To be clear it is trivial to thwart the check, but shared library shims can't fix the real problem which is pointless corporate contempt. Particularly if I'm paying for it.


They took away my "free" <huge amount of space for 2011> many years back. I mainly got the space hosting events at my university and other free work I performed for the company around that time as well as many, many referrals.


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.


> Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use.

Maybe not completely free, but iCloud desktop sync is pretty much a native MacOS clone of Dropbox. Especially for its core feature of cross-device syncing. Perhaps less so for sharing, although MacOS has been slowly adding those features to the point where I no longer get much value out of dropbox at all.

Still paying though, mostly out of laziness to migrate (which is literally as simple as dragging the files into a folder on my desktop, honestly I’m not sure why I haven’t done this yet)


> Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use

Google drive?


Google drive and Dropbox don’t really have the same functionality. Google really wants you to use a web browser; in my experience the filesystem integration has always been flaky. Whereas Dropbox directories that appear in the local filesystem are really solid.


I think you're right that they're not the same but, in the case of that particular example, they are.

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/10838124?hl=en-GB


On the Mac OS that functionality has always been flakey, through several rewrites, not just bug fixes. About half the time it’s not syncing (often due to crashing, but sometimes just mysteriously) on my completely vanilla macos laptop. Dropbox “just works”.


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.


Google Drive's yearly cost for 2TB is almost equal to monthly payment for Dropbox for the same capacity.

However, Dropbox have some underrated yet very powerful features like Apps and automations. I buy books from plethora of places, and new versions of the products I have are uploaded automatically. I just receive a notification. Same for some fonts and design assets I have. SendOwl leverages this capability for anyone, easily.

Auto organization, a clunky but reliable native Linux application, LANSync, etc. are all good things to have, and they have solved the syncing problem.

Also, Google Drive is a ticking time bomb, because if you accidentally put a file Google doesn't like, you have the risk to lose all your Google access at the middle of the night.


>Google Drive's yearly cost for 2TB is almost equal to monthly payment for Dropbox for the same capacity.

Dropbox costs €10 / user / month while Google Drive costs $12 / user / month.


For me, the prices are as follows:

    - Dropbox: $119.88 per year for 2TB, plus $39.99 per year for one year version history.
    - Google Drive: ~$11.3 per year for 2TB, ~$57 per year for 5TB.
Not in the U.S., btw.


Those are crazy low prices for gdrive. central europe i get EUR 10/m for 2TB


where's the linux client?


It is only matter of time before Google will kill it.


Jottacloud


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.


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.


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.


> 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.


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.


Exactly. I'm OneNote user for last 15 years or so. I got roped it in because it was free and good enough for my text notes (with image and PDF attachments).

I transitioned to MacOS 10 years back.. and lo behold, free OneNote application available there too with free cloud storage (OneDrive) and cross device sync story (mobile, Windows). Works great.


No way of avoiding cloud storage though, which is a problem for confidential information. That's why I dropped it when I moved to Mac, and the Windows version later moved to the same restriction. It's a pity: I happily paid for OneNote in the early days, and in some respects I have not found anything as good.

Oh, and one peculiar restriction: I found that there was no way to import the .one files I had brought over from Windows, even though there was at least one third party system which could do it.


> Then, for less than the cost of Evernote, you can get a O365 subscription and get the Office suite and 1TB of storage.

Take the slightly more expensive family pack, and 5 people can use it on 5 devices each. It's one of the too-good-to-be-true deals out there.


Even better, it's 6 people. You plus 5 family members.


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.


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.


I still can't figure out how to use note,I have tried different approach but having to jump different application and rewrite everything 2 or 3 times, just don't compute in my brain.


I don't use OneNote for long standing documentation (maybe one tab is a cheat sheet). I just make a tab for each ongoing work project/client/etc, and paste stuff in there. Text from emails as a todo list which I think write comments to, notes from a zoom call, screenshots of things I need to fix, that sort of thing. I go through and edit or add comments on what needs to be done then just delete it when it's finalised and I can stop thinking about it.

It's basically a cross between a messy desk and todo list. It works well enough for me. I've tried using stuff like Trello and that is a little too much friction for me, the way you can paste text and images together in OneNote and rearrange them visually just works for me. Sometimes it just feels right to have this item "off to the side" or that sort of thing.


Basically how I came around using it, was instead of having txt files, office files and a bunch of screenshots scattered around on the filesystem under the respective project directory, I started organizing such content inside Notes itself.


So you store all your documents within OneNote?


No, only those related to project delivery, that are kind of note taking stuff.

Documentation to be shared across the team is in Confluence or similar wiki platform.

Documents to be shared with the customer are in Office formats.


In systems like that, I often find myself in the frustrating situation of “I know I saw a sentence with <phrase> in it; which of the three systems should I search in? If I don’t find it, is it because the phrase was slightly different, or is there a fourth or fifth system I need to search?”

It’s maddening and is my several times per week experience.


Maybe I have simple needs, but iOS notes does everything I want.

1. Instantly synced between all computers and devices (yes I know I need to be in the Mac/iPhone ecosystem, but I happen to be in that anyway)

2. Create folders

3. Paste images

4. Fonts/bullets etc.

Apparently that's all I need. Anything else is a hindrance.


I love the design of Notes, and I used it a lot for the past few years to store work and personal notes, but I found the sync to be very unreliable. Notes on my iPhone keeps getting out of sync with Notes on my laptop. It happens every few weeks, and I have to log out and login again to fix it. Maddening.

I switched recently to Obsidian and am really enjoying the speed, simplicity, extensibility, and being back in control of my files.


The main reason I love apple notes is it's speed and sync. Just works.

I treed google keep and evernote. Syncing was always overwriting eachother. Starting slow.


Never had that same problem with keep, its almost instantaneous updating for me.


I always have one big note where I add a lot. When using that in both desktop and phone kept overwriting my entries


If they would just improve search it would be really great. There is no way to restrict search to a folder, for example.


Taking notes is a feature, not a product

And given how the "process cyclists" of Notion will move to anything that has more bells and whistles, while the rest of the 99% will use what's available for free and syncs online, it's a hard place to compete

("process cyclists": will pay a lot for every small but hyperoptimized accessory)


You're contradicting yourself. Taking notes is a feature for many, but a product for people whose working style involves taking lots and lots of notes.

Call them "process cyclists" if you want, there is a bimodal distribution for how much people use notes apps, and the people near the high mode are prepared to pay monthly for something good, and tend to be extremely loyal.


> Call them "process cyclists" if you want, there is a bimodal distribution for how much people use notes apps, and the people near the high mode are prepared to pay monthly for something good, and tend to be extremely loyal.

Yes, but Evernote does not fit that category, it fits the 'feature' category


You obviously don't know much about Evernote.


It is a shame Microsoft had basically abandoned OneNote The android app still can't change fonts after 5 years of development. It is pure insanity how little MS cares about their best product They made it brilliant at the start and since then stated they won't update it anymore.


I seriously wish you couldn't change fonts in it. OneNote itself defaults to 11pt Calibri, but the web clipper outputs 12pt Verdana because fuck you. And if you change the font to Verdana, page title font changes from 20pt Calibri Light (IIRC) to like Verdana 20pt which is comically heavy.

Plaintext based notes apps are a blessing in that regard: Since they only store the text, your pages actually look nice and consistent. I have a ton of web clippings in OneNote which are ugly as hell because of font inconsistencies.


I understand that viewpoint and I can see the value in it.

The point I was making is that they done no meaningful improvements on Android since five years. If onenote supports rich text the mobile app should do the same.

I enjoy the rich text since I'm not very organised with my notes, I don't have the patience or discipline to neatly write my thoughts down, I mostly copy paste things and write it in one big OneNote document. I have like 90 different random notes in my 2020 forward dumping note.

I those cases highlighting important info is nice, so I don't have to visually remember where the important things are.

I noticed if I don't allow the chaos I just don't write notes so I prefer this way. I started using todo tasks for things I need to do soon, so babysteps to becoming a compete human ;)


I only wish Microsoft showed it some actual love. The app's been languishing for years, and most any new feature is in the vein of "you can embed TikToks now" or something only applicable to a classroom setting.

That, and while I love that their apps are native, there are serious consistency issues with eg. how search behaves, and the resurrected Windows app still not using the modern sync backend mobile, web and macOS do.


Few years ago I tried to switch to OneNote but it was very sluggish compared to Evernote. I'll give it another go.


true. you even get access and publisher.


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.


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.


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


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).


But you can sync your Obsidian notes for free if you use free Dropbox or OneDrive accounts.


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.


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


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.


I've used https://getrocketbook.com somewhat recently. Supports Evernote and other cloud services too.


> 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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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


> 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..


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.


> 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?


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.


I wonder how that 100 year guarantee is holding up?

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


>Evernote CEO Phil Libin announced at the recent Le Web London conference that the company will soon set up a protected fund and include a legally binding guaratee that users’ data will be maintained for 100 years

That almost sounds like a threat to commit a crime in certain jurisdictions. A lot has changed regarding how we talk about data in the last decade.


> legally binding guaratee that users’ data will be maintained for 100 years That almost sounds like a threat to commit a crime in certain jurisdictions.

It’s (or was) the promise for you to be able to access your data for so long, provided you agree. Not hoarding private data against your will.


Seems like a lot of these replies are skipping over the “almost” in my comment. I was not being literal. I was pointing out that they simply assumed that all users would want this. There was no “provided you agree” disclaimer in their comments. If anything, the specifics of it being 100 years actually implies that consent isn’t even a consideration since we can assume that nearly all Evernote users will be dead in 100 years. It is a strange reminder that so few people were concerned about this sort of thing in 2012.


Better start burning down the libraries too then? Preserving customer data with their explicit consent isn't related to data retention rules in privacy laws.


That announcement was in 2012.[1] Did they do it? I can't find any indication that they actually implemented it. Which was a good reason to get off Evernote a decade ago.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2012/06/21/tech/web/internet-data-everno...


GDPR was not designed to target service providers providing a data service storing and processing data that the customer explicitly contracted for. That would be under data processing which has different rules.

Unless the guarantee was for Evernote to hold this data for 100 years irrespective of what the customer wishes and for example after the customer has ended their contract for the service, this angle doesn't apply.


Many companies are purging data associated with inactive accounts as part of data minimization. If the user specifically asked for indefinite retention before going inactive, that might be one thing, but as a general practice it could be risky.


In legal terms Evernote is not "data controller" but "data processor". They are not responsible for ensuring conformity with retention rules.


A data processor has no say in how and for how long is the data stored. They implement exactly hat the data controller said, not more, not less. So in this case guaranteeing 100 years is just nonsense. But... in our case it's Evernote itself who gathered all its own data from its own users according to its own rules, so I really struggle to understand why you won't see them as data controllers.


As far as GDPR is concerned, I think they are a controller if they are processing data to provide their service they run to customers. The control how that service works, and are not processing data on behalf of a controller explicitly under their written instructions. If they were a service used by a company like this, they would be a processor. The rertention period here is presumably until the user closes their account or deletes the data from it, possibly plus some period to allow for Evernote to delete it, and the basis is performance of the contract created by their terms of service, or consent. If so, they don't have to delete it until they are instructed to bny the user. They would have to probvide for a way gfor it to be deleted by the organisation they setup to retain it when setting that up though. That organisation would be a processor, unless an explicit relationship with the customer was created with them (which I would expect there would be as part of the user accepting using it), in which case I think it would also be a controller. Either way, they would be responsible for deleting the data when the customer wants it deleted because either they would be as a result of their relationship with the cuastomer if they were a controller, or because it would (have to be) be part of the terms of the processoring agreement with Evernote.


Is it a threat to commit a crime if it was posted before the law existed?


Exactly. Retrospective laws like that would face stiff opposition.


Ex post facto laws should be prohibited in any civilized country.


Holding data is on ongoing behavior. It isn't an ex post facto law to change how a company handles it in the future. Coca-Cola can't sell you a soda with cocaine in it just because it was legal when they started their business.

What would make it an ex post facto law is if companies were punished for how they handled data before the law was created. It is perfectly reasonable to punish them if they continue that same behavior after the law was created.


True. But for Coke, at least, I wish they'd "grandfathered" it in!


I think it would greatly complicate things if cold-storage backups count as holding data.

Some poor kid would have to go and load all the tapes and redact it.


An excellent comment.


Every privacy policy and terms of service document is an ex post facto "law" if it was changed even once.


Public laws and private contracts are two different things.

For one, you can typically opt out of the latter, but not the former.


Copying my comment from a couple of days ago as that is simply not practically true:

>All my university systems run on Microsoft. All my future employers' systems will probably run on Microsoft. All public transport in my country effectively requires an app which is tied to either Google or Apple operating systems to buy tickets. Schools require students as young as 6 years old to have an iPad or chromebook tied to Google or Apple.

>There is no real choice in our modern society to "not give your personal data" to these megacorps.

You'd have to be homeless, unemployed, unbanked and practically a hermit to even approach "opting out" from this private law. That's not a real choice.


The solution is to have goverments use Linux which many do, use libre office suites, sponsor projects that government project's outsourcing companies use. Web interfaces for all services without needing to signup for a third party EULA.


Sadly though, that still doesn't resolve other problems.

How many people have gmail addresses? Use Google products, such as Google's VOIP service? How many cars, or home(now) come with such products built in?

I guess what I'm getting at is, even if you do your best to purge yourself, and even if you try to purge the government, you're still left dealing with people, and if you email them at gmail, then Google still gets the entire conversation.

And if we somehow manage to create at "Don't store this" situation, will it be like when the Canadian government passed a law, forcing Google, Facebook, etc to pay for linking to stories? Just as Australia did?

They're effectively dropped all Canadian news sources.

So, would they "drop" users who have requested no data storage? That is, you cannot email anyone at gmail? It goes into a dead hole?

I suspect that freemium, as a business model, is going to be completely incompatible with democracy.


Google just recently updated their ToS for purging accounts that aren't active thereby dropping accounts which were part of free tier.


Yeah, it's typically easier to emigrate out of the reach of your law's country than to avoid the reach of these trillion-dollar-worth corporations.


Or with enough laws, every law can be applied selectively


WWCD


Crime against humanity didn't even exist as a concept (let alone a law) before Nuremberg, do you think the condamnation of the nazis there as “uncivilized”?


The retroactive criminalisation at Nuremberg absolutely was controversial at the time. It only got pushed through because of US instance. It is literally an example of might making right.


Seems like an extreme counter example. In the spirit of the parent post I guess you could argue theft, murder etc. was already illegal?

Also, it is morally different when you want to punish lawmakers.


> Seems like an extreme counter example.

It is voluntarily ridiculously extreme, because the parent comment was itself ridiculously categorical.

The thing is: most of the time, retro-active laws are dangerous tools that should be used rarely and with caution, but sometimes and when some people have been doing something that they knew was evil even though not technically illegal, it can make sense to punish them with laws designed after the fact.


Sure fair enough. That is the problem with many rules of thumb, where people interpret "all" and "always" to mean all and always.

Especially evident in programming. E.g. "premature optimization is the root of all evil".


That’s one line everyone remembers snipped from somewhat more nuanced context.

Knuth said: "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."


Oh ... ye well Knuth makes my point. :)


No, it’s not a threat to commit a crime (grandparent wrote “almost”).

Still, the problem remains; i.e. a new law is likely to require you to remove some content that you’ve been serving or to change the way you’re handling the content.


> legally binding guaratee that users’data will be maintained for 100 years

This sounds mostly like a PR stunt to use the word "legally" to try to instill a false sense of confidence in users when in reality, "legally" doesn't mean much. Legally binding to what? The corporation? The corporation can run out of funds and die in 2 years, and then the contract isn't bound to anything.

Legally binding for 100 years has NOTHING to do with staying alive for 100 years.


So much shit here against GDPR which is basically:

1. if you want your data removed, companies HAVE to remove your data

2. if you don't want your data stored, companies CANNOT store your data

and then a bunch of if-when-then-else-must-cannot-time-dependent-legal-stuff


You conveniently forgot to define what really is "your data".


If you send an email from gmail to me, you don't get to ask that it be deleted just because you decide to delete your own gmail account. (Well you can ask but it would be unreasonable to comply. Same, if arguably less strongly, for comments you've made on posts or in threads on social media.)


only companies are subject to GDPR


The devil's in the details.


I wonder if this eroding trust with startups and companies will become a real problem for them. I mean by now things like "lifetime subscription" have little meaning coming a commercial entity.

Well, I'm off enjoying the last few weeks of my lifetime HBO cheap subscription.


I’ve been delighted with my “lifetime” Plex pass, but I worry the day will soon come when I discover the end of the lifetime.

Marco Arment has occasionally complained about lifetime, one-time Overcast premium subscriptions and how he’d really like to rug pull those. But, to his credit, has no present plans to do so. However, it’s more because he doesn’t want to deal with the backlash, rather than because the right thing to do is honor “lifetime.”


> However, it’s more because he doesn’t want to deal with the backlash, rather than because the right thing to do is honor “lifetime.”

Yeah, it's that. He mentioned once that Apple had a rule where you can't remove functionality bought through in-app purchases, probably around the same time he was lamenting one-time subscriptions. He definitely would pull the rug (to use the phrase) if he could, and I wonder if he limits adding features to Overcast because of it.


I’m reminded of a quote from Tommy Boy about guarantees.

> Ted Nelson, Customer : But why do they put a guarantee on the box?

>Tommy : Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product from me


Tommy Boy quotes? A true scholar of the old school.


> a legally binding guaratee that users’ data will be maintained for 100 years, even if the company itself is bought or ceases to be.

If you ain’t got the cash, your words don’t matter


I see that the article says "will", but CEOs and their companies will square the circle every time they are drumming up publicity and impressing potential investors. If they have squared the circle it would be such a feat that there will be a press release talking about it in the past tense, not the progressive or the future.


>I wonder how that 100 year guarantee is holding up?

I wonder when did such a bold guarantee work in practice?


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)


I'm biased but I'd add--

- Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/

- Logseq: https://logseq.com/

- Reflect: https://reflect.app/

- Stashpad: https://stashpad.com/


I'm wondering what happy mediums might exist between the note-taking world, the wiki world, and the collaborative office document world.

Office-oriented tools like Nextcloud or Collabora seem to be oriented to classic Microsoft Word / Google Docs style documents... not as simple as Markdown or as web-friendly as a wiki page.

The note taking tools everyone's talking about don't seem to support collaborative editing. If they're file-based without a server, then you either have to lock the file for editing, or you have to always remember to sync first to avoid conflicts. Syncthing can't really handle that scenario very well.

Also, wikis usually aren't file-based... they require a database. Plus they don't seem to be as lovingly designed as the note-taking tools... they seem to have a very retro MediaWiki style.

Does anyone know of a self-hosted solution that checks all those boxes? File-based (perhaps aided by database driven indexing) with real collaborative editing, more web-oriented than Word-oriented?


Disclaimer, I'm on AFFiNE's team.

But I really think you can check us out as I think we can cover those boxes for you.

We offer real-time collaborative editing which also works offline. We deal with all those conflict issues for you.

And though we aren't file-based, we do offer various export options such as MD, HTML, PDF and images.

We expect to have the latest Docker version and real-time collaboration available towards the end of this month. In the mean time I'd invite you to try the client to see how it feels.


Are there plans to make it e2ee?


I've been using Logseq for a few months and am loving it. Its model is pretty different from Evernote, and in ways I think are superior. The heart of is the daily journal, and you can tag each lump (which they call a block) with hashtags. You can also create pages, of course, but I find myself doing that less and less.


Yeah, Logseq really works with my mind. I create pages, but as anchors to refer to various people or concepts. Every block is created inside the daily note. It took me a while to stop overthinking it and just use the daily note.

Logseq's killer feature, though, is the Anki plugin: https://github.com/debanjandhar12/logseq-anki-sync

... it's so easy to create and revise cards using this plugin, which is really important, as I almost never get a card's shape right for committing something to memory on the first try.

A couple caveats I'd mention:

* Logseq's sync system was really buggy for me during the time I used it. I stopped using it for a while, as the sync was the only way I could get E2E encryption and still have mobile access. With iOS advanced data security, I feel like iCloud sync gets me most of the way there. * They really need to invest in the editor experience. If I had something like a Bear or Typora experience within Logseq, I think I'd have my perfect tool.


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.


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)


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!


They do some things really well. I like the speed and effectiveness of the sync across various devices and OSs, like a personal pastebin.

I have a subscription, and was hoping that they'd converge towards something like a wiki, where the notes can link to each other. The suggestion seemed to be rejected out of hand, maybe it's just not their vision. It is mine, though, so I have migrated to Joplin, and expect to let the subscription expire at this point.


I am also surprised at how rarely Standard Notes is mentioned.


I really like it ... the ios app is great, it syncs super fast, I love how easy it is to switch between plain text, markdown, todo list, etc... It's perfect for my workflow, I just find it odd that nobody else was mentioning it.

So here I am doing so! If you don't use it, check it out.


It looks really, really interesting. But when you say it syncs super fast... is syncing initiated manually, or do you mean that changes on one device appear on another device quickly?


the latter. I can make note changes on my phone and a few seconds later sit down at my desktop and everything is updated.


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.


Amplenote looks really promising.


Do any permit a transfer-in from Evernote?


Joplin does, and it works rather well. I have been planning on migrating my notes since the acquisition, but wanted to see what their next move was.

Joplin seems like the best at handling my mix of text notes, PDF files, and images at the moment. If it doesn't work out, though, at least I have my data in a more open form.


Standard Notes claims to, with a caveat that there may be a format it can't handle due to Evernote adding features.

A transfer-in from Evernote, either natively or through some third party utility, is a must. I'm not interested in writing something to parse .enex and put it into some other format (although .enex looks pretty easy to parse - it's xml with embedded BASE64 for some things like images).


Joplin does


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?


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


Obsidian is a bunch of markdown files.


Google Keep for people who just want a Notepad that syncs


Am I the only one who just keeps a bunch of Sublime Text tabs open? Obsidian looks pretty good for the tagging functionality though


Do any of these replicate evernote's web clipping feature? That was definitely the killer app for me.


You might like the browser plug in SingleFile to save and markup pages. I've incorporated it into my obsidian vault workflow.


Can any of these record voice notes?


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.


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.


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/


Have you tried Obsidian?

3 days ago one of the obsidian makers posted this: https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1675626836821409792

Key quote:

"These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last."

Seems to align with your philosophy


Obsidian's problem is Sync + Publish costs way too much, esp. when compared with competitors.

Notesnook provides almost everything Evernote provides, with encryption, better publishing and syncing.

Notion provides more features, incl. publishing and syncing plus the kitchen sink and its factory, yet it doesn't have offline access.

For sync + publish, I have to pay 1.5x what Dropbox wants for 2TB of storage, or what Trello wants for a year, etc.

It makes no sense, at least for me.

BTW, Evernote's .enex format is just well-defined XML. You can parse and convert it into anything you want. It's a modest superset of Markdown.


>Obsidian's problem is Sync + Publish costs way too much, esp. when compared with competitors.

You can sync for free using Syncthing or OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox free accounts.


Thanks! Does that work with the mobile app, too?


Yes, it does.


On ios you can only do icloud though


It blows my mind that Apple can tell you how you're allowed to copy your plain text files from one of your computers to another one of your computers. If you look at the behavior sans the branding, it would not be hard to label it malware.


not sure we have the same definition of 'malware'. the problem isn't copying/syncing the file from one computer to another, that works just fine. but obsidian can't read outside its own app folder IIRC.

i sync files with dropbox to my ios devices all the time.


I define "malware" to mean software that intentionally subverts the desires of the owner of the computer (unintentional subversion is a bug or a miscommunication).

Apple arbitrarily restricts you from using your applications (obsidian) to read and write your data in a way that you can sync, to no fault of its own, your own, or the syncing service.

I strongly encourage you to try associating this kind of behavior with an unfamiliar organization as a mental exercise. How would you feel about that? Someone else restricting your access to your computer such that you cannot use your applications how you want, through no technical fault of their own? I bet that would see that as a problem you would want to fix right away.


Apple is upfront about it and I knew what I was getting (and not getting). To be honest, i can barely ever use any of my software the way i want it.

Obsidian's sync service for example has dark patterns and is a lot closer to your definition of malware as they are hiding how their sync works (versioning, bugs they know but don't advertise, merge conflicts that destroys data etc).

> I bet that would see that as a problem you would want to fix right away.

No. But I also don't know what "fix" means in this context? Not use Obsidian? As using Android is not an option.


Apple may be upfront, but a couple of years ago they pretty much suddenly destroyed Progressive Web Apps by disallowing a whole bunch of modern, open standard browser capabilities, all in the name of preventing tracking.

A lot of developers were just crushed by that. Imagine having hundreds of thousands of dollars into developing an app when Apple just destroys the ability to do it.

When a big corporation has monopoly power (and Apple is very close to that - only one equally evil competitor in mobile space), they do bad things, often thinking they are doing good.

[caveat - there is so far an unofficial way to get around their "we will blow away your saved browser data" that was discussed by one of the webkit developers on the webkit blog. But since it isn't an official Apple doc - do we trust it?]

I was one developer who was burned. I was developing, as a volunteer, a web app for a very large volunteer organization. Boom... now it may not be possible, or if I use the work-around, it may be possible until it suddenly changes.


You seem to be ignoring the whole voluntary aspect of using Apple devices. Are you being forced to using iOS at gun point? Up vote once for yes, twice for no.


It’s not like it’s a dark pattern, hidden under multiple layers of disinformation and redirection. Apps have always been siloed on iOS and it has even got better as some apps can break out of the container model (PDF Viewer is a prime example). I bought an iPhone and an iPad knowing that. If it ever bugs me, I switch to Android (which, BTW, is moving to the container model). Which means Obsidian could have requested permissions for the folder to be placed somewhere else (Textastic can access random folders on the filesystem).

Even though my phone and my tablet is capable of being a general purpose device, it was not the reason I bought them. They have a specific purpose and they are filling it well. I wouldn’t buy a microwave and complain I can’t make cakes with it.


There's a plugin that resolves this (https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save) and you can also use pre-launch shortcuts using WorkingCopy if you want to sync via git.


I tried using iCloud to sync for a year and went back to Obsidian Sync. I’m not sure exactly what the culprit was, but frequently, I would find my ToDo note (which was used the most) would be stuck and fail to sync for days. Rebooting the stick machine would clear the issue. I was using two Macs and my iPhone at the time.


For me it's fixed by rebooting my mac actually. Had that yesterday for the first time. You can check who's not syncing by checking the "Files" app.


because it uses icloud drive. and that syncs poorly and on its own schedule. it would sometimes take a day or so to get a file from my mac studio to my macbook. it is crazy how bad icloud is.


my wife and I share stuff within icloud and we both HATE IT SO MUCH. It's truly mind boggling how bad it is, and continues to be, in 2023. Photos sometimes sync, sometimes they don't. Cool. Sometimes rebooting the phone makes them sync, other times not. Awesome. Sometimes shared notes get updated, other times they don't. Sometimes shared note invitations just never arrive at all, for no discernible reason. Sweet. It took us 4 attempts to do a shared Home app invitation. The first 3 times it just never showed up.

We HATE HATE HATE icloud so much but our only other option is to switch everything to Android and I hate Google more than I hate Apple, so ....... we just stick with icloud and its absolute shittiness.


Switch to Microsoft? OneNote's entire file format is built to enable live collaboration. Their apps may be a bit clunky but they work.


> Notesnook provides almost everything Evernote provides, with encryption, better publishing and syncing.

In the two years I've used Notesnook, my biggest issue is the slow syncing between devices: A change I make on the mobile app takes minutes to update on the desktop app, whereas a similar change on the Obsidian mobile app is nearly instantaneous. Additionally, Notesnook doesn't allow external editors, like vim or emacs, to edit files. Sure, you can extort files to Markdown, but those do not get synced anywhere. Obsidian gives a user the flexibility by editing files directly without the app.


I tried obsidian but didn’t feel it was much better than opening a folder in VSCode, and as I am already used to VSCode, that is easier for me.


The tagging features and the ability to just paste a picture in a markdown file are the things that bring me back to Obsidian instead of VSCode


Same. Have you tried https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ ? It does some of the things Obsidian does, but is a VS Code Plugin. I really like that combination.


Have you tried https://www.dendron.so/ ? I think that was aiming to be a knowledgebase in vscode


I replied to him with with my idea and article https://twitter.com/brajeshwar/status/1675905574624702465

From the article, “Right now, I use Obsidian to manage my notes. The beauty of this setup is that I can change tools anytime, while my notes remain free of any dependency.”


Since when twitter allows posting 2172 character long message? Apparently char limit is now 25k for subscribers...


I am having a better experience using plain text over a mosh connection than using apps that sync files over the network.

The logic is that if I have internet connection available to sync, then I can also connect to my computer and use a tmux session with vim to edit my plain text notes. If I use the same tmux session in all devices, then the notes are always in sync.


I’ve been using the same OneNote notebook for 20 years. It automatically syncs across all my mobile devices, the web and desktop. It supports all kinds of rich text and images.

It’s way simpler than setting up manual backup and syncing of a tons of text file.


Write-up of a similar system. http://songseed.org/post/20120101.aa.saga.html


Sticking to plain text is like living in a cave - possible, but unpleasant. Why would you remove all the formatting and integration niceties of modern tech?

> Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text.

So what? Every relevant device can also read and write a bunch of more useful formats


I absolutely love plain text notes. Maybe you could understand that just because you think something is unpleasant and ancient, the rest of the entire human race might not agree? Shocking I know.

I can't stand any formatting whatsoever on my notes. I love plain text because it stays exactly as that: plain text. I don't want my dashes to be turned into spacers, I don't want my asterisks to be turned into lists, etc...


TBC, those examples are from markdown, which is orthogonal to the plain <> styled text axis.


Not as shocking as you trying to speak for the whole human race, which evolved past no formatting while still living in the caves


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.


What happens if you try to sign up for a new account? Similar level of malfunction, I assume.

I am so sick of this reality. Endless dark patterns to get your money. Nearly impossible to get out. Why ever make a good product when you can just seek rent and fall into that perfect optimum of cheap-enough that cancelling is not worth the pain.


This is what virtual Credit Cards are for... Each site gets a separate number and I can expire them as needed. Unfortunately, if they get popular vendors will figure out a way to detect and refuse.


BofA had a online tool (Flash based I think) to generate and manage virtual CC numbers linked to your real card.

When Flash was sunset -- they gave a BS reasoning and shutdown this tool as well whithout making an effort to rebuild / replace.

I am surprised there was no big backlash from customers given the increasing online fraud and privacy/security consciousness of banking users.

Which (US) banks currently offer this virtual CC feature? I am a customer of three big banks/CC and none of them have this.


I have not used it and it may not be exactly what you want. But I seem to remember hearing PayPal offers a virtual card that can be used online.


Capital One has this feature I believe, I've been to lazy to set it up.


Does Apple Pay work like this?


Citi


> Unfortunately, if they get popular vendors will figure out a way to detect and refuse.

Most likely it's not going to happen. While the card is virtual, payments are done with real money. Risking to lose a customer with real money isn't something most businesses will do.


If they won't be able to extract money from your CC, they will sue you since the've already billed you for the service.


What if it's like a small amount like $25? I'm asking because I owe AWS that amount but I lost my credentials so I can't even login to pay anymore and I don't wanna jump through hoops just so I can pay THEM.


I don't know why you're being downvoted - this could happen, especially if you're in the same jurisdiction as the company.


Privacy changed their issuer precisely because this happened.


Yep, since Privacy changed I've had zero issues with cards on sites. I've used them for years without any issues, I can definitely recommend them.


Assume away, but to play devil's advocate, how much testing do you think is done on the close account procedures vs add new account and accept money from that account? i'll bet it's not even close to being even


I don’t accept that. If those procedures are failing, then someone should be getting 5xx alerts. Before they started failing, unit and integration tests should’ve been raising alarms.

A site that remains persistently broken has a lot more wrong with it than just some software bugs.


Just because a 5xx alert is sent doesn't mean that someone will do anything about it, even if they didn't just lay off the entire staff. I'm sure some PM triaged the 5xx notices and anything coming from close account just gets pushed to the bottom of the queue. Obviously, I have no knowledge if that's what actually happened. I'm just continuing the advocacy of the devil


While that’s clearly true here, it’s a giant red flag if a PM is ignoring… a giant red flag.


Why? It's extremely common that massive 5xx errors across a service are largely just ignored unless it reaches a certain threshold. This is what I've observed in virtually every single large project I've worked on or with, and it's already quite bad for non-subscription services. If it can be dismissed as "only single digit % of users are affected rarely", it doesn't get attention.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's so common with paid software offerings that it's no longer a red flag for me; I just assume that blocking issues that can be presented as only affecting a small number of users will not be addressed, especially if they're considered temporary issues. AWS and Azure certainly aren't paying out a ton when they have outages or system errors that for all intents and purposes render the services offered or machines running on their infrastructure whenever they have issues.†

For me it's hard to escape the conclusion that many services are over-subscribing their Systems and Developer staff across too many things presented as a single service; identity management, compute services, storage services, payment processing, free tiers, and so much more under a single service. A systems error or login problem or the classic Google problem of a single flagged account irradiating everything it touches on the platform is all it takes to completely take down your operations.

And the SLAs/TOS/EULA are quite complex on these platforms; it's hard for me to think that most persons can truly understand what they are agreeing to when signing up for these platforms, including the companies offering the platforms; in my own experience dealing with Storage-aaS vendors who provide S3 storage, it's very hard to get straight answers on outages or massive 5xx situations. (Embarrassingly, said Storage-aaS vendors' support teams have said in no ambiguous way that a 5xx error responses is a _client side error_ that needs to be investigated by the maintainer of the client accessing the S3 services...and I maintain it's incorrect for said vendors to use 503/500 as a response for "please slow down" when we have the 504 "Slow Down" response with S3, or the classic 429 HTTP response could be served instead, both of which are actionable for client applications)

The services are too big and doing too much, and not always very well. And ignoring the "small" interruptions that basically prevent the users of the platforms from doing their work is the norm; if the issue doesn't hit at least double-digit percentages of users, my experience is that the platforms do not budge or move since it can be hand waved away. And the user recourse in such situations is basically non-existent; maybe you'll get some credit, maybe you won't, who knows? The platforms sure don't, despite the monstrous EULAs they ask you to agree to.

I don't know what the answer is, but I really cannot consider many of the platforms, regardless of whether its for work or personal social purposes, as reliable. If a platform is going to present itself as a backbone of modern internet/computing, it's really trying to claim it's a utility, but it doesn't want to behave like a utility, it wants to get more spending from the users; as long as this is the case, where the user capture efforts take higher priority than maintaining the services and using plausibly deniable tactics to eschew that responsibility, I cannot get excited or interested in platforms; I will use them as the projects I work on require the platforms, but if it were up to me, I'd not put everything on platforms and diversify as much as possible.

† You can [0] submit a request for credit, but I'm not sure how much credit is being issued this way; I will give AWS a small nod to the fact that at least for me, their SLA Guarantee page is "fairly" easy to read, but my issue is that it looks like they only will offer credit for a fairly small amount of specific situations, and it's unclear how many of these requests are honored. A very brief search for a few terms on how long/often AWS refunds occur returns mostly the official documentation pages without any statistics, and also a few posts from AWS forums with users asking; the first post on the few threads I checked though were mostly "here's what you could have done to avoid this" scenarios; maybe the users indeed were doing something quite wrong, but at the same time it's unnerving to not quickly find stories about the process working well and efficiently.

0 - https://aws.amazon.com/compute/sla/


Absolutely true, but cross reference: the new owning company is laying off Evernote's staff.

So in this case, yes, there is a lot more wrong.


Tests..? For a SaaS? Surely not?


There have been stories of how convoluted and practically impossible the unsubscribe process from Amazon Prime is.

At almost every step, the system sort of nags you with "Do you REALLY want to do this?" almost with a trolling attitude!

If this is the case with proper big tech capitalist, think what will the scenario be with smaller pleb capitalists like Evernote in this grave recession.


Amazon got suspicious that a CC I was using is not mine and locked my account. But they continued to happily charge "not mine" credit card for Prime fees. And I couldn't login into locked account to cancel Prime. Took hours on the phone with clueless support to finally cancel that. Account is still locked.


Instead of charging CC, AWS should have the prepaid balance approach that digital ocean and others have. The big guys can recharge however much they want but small scale users can also escape the headaches of incorrect charges to account.

Also CC use is declining across the world as more people are realizing the problem of debt trap, they should come up with alternative methods like UPI and bank transfer.


There's at most like three do you really want to dialogs to cancel prime. I do a month every so often and the cancellation works reliably. It's bad yeah but not anywhere as bad as the site just not allowing you to cancel.


Yeah, I was surprised about the recent rulings ...

I've found it easy to cancel ... and several times where I forgot to cancel, customer services happily, easily and promptly refunded the charge ...

I'm no big tech Amazon fan ... but never had a problem.


I can understand them making it more difficult to accidentally cancel your membership, because that's how they make money. An "are you sure" or "please don't go" message doesn't annoy me.

Intentionally (?) breaking the site so that you can't cancel is another story.


Is it different in different jurisdictions? I get 1 month of Prime at a time and cancel all the time.


I canceled mine maybe a week ago. So hopefully it can be done for you, too!

For anyone not jumping ship, you can reduce your price hike to only 78-ish total per year by clicking through the cancelation menus.


I believe you can inform your credit card provider and have them freeze payments for the company.


I just canceled and it worked fine. Where are you getting stuck?


You canceled without logging in?


Can’t you just do a chargeback on the next subscription charge? If enough people do that, the card issuer will probably hit them with fines of some sort.


I think, in general, you can always file a chargeback if you're prepared for the possibility of losing access to your account and data.


If you have an apple card, just change your number.


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


You can already do this with Evernote in fact, it’s called “AI cleanup”. It’s not that good now but I like the idea of having an AI format everything cleanly


Do you like the idea of OpenAI logging all of your private notes for all time (and receiving a copyright sublicense for them from Evernote)?


Well I’m talking more generically when I said I like the idea. If you’re uploading your notes to a cloud service like Evernote, you should already be thinking about acceptable privacy policies.


Sounds like spellcheck with write permissions to me


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.


I use Obsidian for quite a few things, but I view Obsidian and Evernote as different apps functionally.

I can't email notes into Obsidian. Obsidian doesn't have a web clipper, note reminders, markup tools. I mean sure, I could cover some of that with plug-ins, but at a certain point things become inconvenient.

For text-only notes Obsidian is great. For web clips, emailing notes in, multimedia, I just find EN much easier than trying to jam everything into a text editor.


> I can't email notes into Obsidian. Obsidian doesn't have a web clipper, note reminders, markup tools. I mean sure, I could cover some of that with plug-ins, but at a certain point things become inconvenient.

I don’t care about any of those features. I care about capturing and organizing ideas that are almost always text.

It’s cool you like EN but I think that market is much smaller and EN was just reaching for super edge cases to please a few users and trying to get “regular” users to pay as well.


Obsidian Web Clipper: https://stephanango.com/obsidian-web-clipper


Tried it. Forcing multimedia into a text editor doesn't always work the best.

I do use Obsidian for text notes that are of my own making, but for pulling in media and other file types, I find a tool like EN so much easier to use.


+1 for Obsidian. So much faster that Notion and does what I need, with amazing plugin ecosystem if you want specific features.


It's not open source. If migrate from Evernote, at least it's better to migrate to FOSS. Sadly, most FOSS solutions lack mobile app support.


Open source is not a cure-all you know. I prefer to pay for quality software than spend countless hours trying to compile a thing someone abandoned years ago.


It's essentially impossible to create a SaaS app that's fully FOSS. And what good would it do?

Furthermore, FOSS is orthogonal to support and usability. It's a meaningless property on its own.


The data store is just a folder tree of .md text files. You don't even need Obsidian to view them, it just makes navigating the links a little easier.


Yeah, ^ this is what convinced me to switch to it. It just produces reasonable, compliant markdown files, and displays them. Most markdown-folder apps handle its output just fine, it's just a better experience.

I like open source a lot, but for my data I much prefer interoperable. I've watched too many projects and companies die and take my stuff with them.


The notes are all in markdown stored on your disk. IMO that is more important than the app source code being open. I can easily take my data and write another app.


logseq is open source, but you gotta pay for (e2ee) sync. Joplin is open source and you can do e2ee with a joplin server or s3 backed. I didn't care for Obsidian. logseq for me.


Paying for sync is absolutely fine as long as the client is open source. Thanks for the logseq recommendation, it looks very good from the first sight! I only wish they had NeoVim plugin like Obsidian has.


Agreed, I pay for logseq sync. Down below someone mentioned doing it with sync thing, but paying is easier for me, and supports development to boot. There is a logseq plugin for vi-like keybindings, but predictably, it's just meh. Hope you enjoy logseq, it's amazing.


I have never used this, but for NeoVim it looks like you might be able to use this (or hack on it a bit to make it work with LogSeq a bit better) https://github.com/artempyanykh/marksman


I’ve only started playing with it recently, but they have CMD-d CMD-a shortcut to open a file in default editor.


I am using LogSeq happily on Android and desktop, syncing with Syncthing. It works well enough.


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611355


I mostly use Google Keep, which works pretty well. Though the "clippings" feature saving Web articles is pretty cool and doesn't have much of an analogue with that product.


Just wait until they shut it down.


I guess I'll just switch to a new notebook application again if that happens. Very few of these notes are useful for long.


I’m using my note taking system as a personal knowledge base. It’s the most valuable chunk of information I have.


Google keep us awesome! Very underrated. I use logseq most of the time but keep when I'm on mobile and I'll sync them later. There are scripts to hello transfer but doing it manually is pretty easy.

But on it's own keep gives me everything I need, except for the local markdown file database.


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.


I was a big (paid) Evernote user for a long time, and also don't particularly like Onenote. I switched to Notion (paid) and it's been pretty good - they had a patch a year or two ago where the mobile apps were a bit rough but they have improved a fair bit. I don't make big use of some of the more advanced features but the basics are solid and work well. Sharing a couple of notebooks with family members works fine. Exporting and importing from Evernote also worked quite well, a bit of formatting fixup was needed on really old notes.

(Note - the Notion Reddit forum is full of weird life optimization types who want a dashboard for their entire lives with aspirational quotes or something, and that doesn't match my use case even slightly. You don't have to do any of that stuff.)

Obsidian looks nice but the pricing for the sync feature, converted to my currency, is wildly out of whack. It wants to charge me the same amount per year as a family license for all of Office 365, so that's a non starter.


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: :( :( :(


You missed "Let's add subscription and tell the stupid users it'll actually be used to improve their experience!"


Evernote had subscription since the beginning


For the first few years I could ignore the subscription because I didn’t want those features. Then they eventually made the subscription required for really basic things, so I left Evernote.


Users hate increased prices, but what if we insinuate that they are stupid when we announce it to soften the blow?


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.


Can it record voice notes?


I would consider dictation an OS feature nowadays.


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.


That's why I use https://github.com/laurent22/joplin

It's markdown, open-source, free. With desktop and mobile support.

Syncs notes to any cloud of your choice for free. (I use One Drive)

Optionaly you can pay them to sync your data on their cloud. So they even have a compelling business model!


Personally, I just use markdown text files+vimwiki on my laptop, along with Markor for Android, and Syncthing to get my notes where I need 'em, but in the end the principle is the same: Own Your Damn Data!


You just gave me an 'aha' moment here. I've been using the cli version of joplin basically as a text-file manager, but with a decent-ish mobile app. I've been struggling with keeping it updated etc and have been considering going back to just text files.

I wasn't aware of markor and really like it, it seems to handle editing text files really well.

Already use syncthing, so why bother with joplin at all?


But that's not a reliable sync mechanism without a server or a better format like CRDT:(


Hmm... another Electron-based app (already have VSCode, Postman, Beekepper Studio).

But oh well, let's give it a try :D


Joplin will be unusable until they give up on obfuscating the md files.


Sorry I don't understand. It allows to export to many formats, including markdown:

https://i.imgur.com/dK6trmN.png


A tad similar story with my experience.

“Plain text is a powerful universal tool that is almost zero cost, work across platforms, are light enough to work remotely over poor connections, doesn’t go out of date, and is quick to learn.”

https://brajeshwar.com/2022/plain-text/


Did you export the Evernote into plain text?


I need to be able to sync my notes though, I use more than one device. I'd like for them to not be lost if a phone or laptop is stolen.

Ideally, it'd just sync to webdav and I could use Nextcloud. But I've only ever found a few that did sync with it, and there were always all sorts of weird limitations or bugs in those.


I have a private github repo for this. I don't have a commit discipline for any of this, just using github for storing some MBs of plain text.

Having a log maybe useful some day, though.


I've been doing the same for the past few years, but have yet to figure out a good way to sync things between my devices. Not that it bothers me too much, but sometimes I'd like to have that convenience.


Try https://github.com/laurent22/joplin + cloud drive of your choice (I use One Drive).

See my reply to your parent commenter.


Thanks for the suggestion! By the looks of it, it seems to be a complete solution similar to Evernote, whereas I just need to figure out the 'syncing' part of things (I use Emacs for the rest).


I use dropbox to sync.


I've contemplated this, but in general I'm not a big fan of hosting personal files on the cloud if it can be avoided. Maybe if I use rclone and encrypt it...?


What about Syncthing ? It’s Dropbox like (you sync folders over different computers) but it’s totally P2P (so no cloud).


If you are okay with rclone (and do have vps/server/whatever somewhere) then Syncthing is the thing to do that.

https://docs.syncthing.net/


I use cryptomator and store my notes on Github (encrypted)


I'm syncing between my devices with Resilio sync


I use Dropbox and symlink my notes to ~/org


Git? Syncthing?


I do use Git for source control-purposes, but this is the first time I hear of Syncthing. Would that allow for completely automated and frictionless syncing?


it'll be very good. it won't resolve conflicts for you, though - just like Dropbox or Google Drive also wouldn't. It's last-write-wins, so you either need to keep your devices connected and syncing at all times, or you need to be careful when you edit the same files on different devices.

I use Syncthing for all kinds of things and it's excellent, but it's not really a silver for bullet for mutable data like text files.


I have a small vps as one of my syncthing nodes, and every device syncs with that central server in addition to syncing with eachother. This removes the need to keep everything online at the same time as the vps is always online, receiving and propagating changes from any device.


Yeah me too. I love syncthing but prefer using it with an always on 'server' like dropbox rather than just pure p2p.

What I really like about it is that you don't have to sync everything everywhere. I have work folders I sync with just my work machines, and personal ones that go to my personal VPS.


I'll look into it, thanks for the suggestion! The risk de-synchronization poses can probably be mitigated with automated local backups.


BTW, just a second vote for Syncthing, here. It's basically my "move data around" Swiss Army knife.

Need to get my Keepass database on my phone? Syncthing.

Need to back up my reMarkable to my NAS? Syncthing.

Need to replicate game saves between my PC and my Steamdeck because the game doesn't support Steam Cloud Sync (I'm looking at you, Subnautica)? Syncthing.

I run Paperless as a document management system and use Genius Scan on my phone. I use Syncthing to automatically move scans from my phone to the Paperless inbox folder.

And none of that data resides on a third party cloud. Just encrypted, peer-to-peer sync. It really is fantastic.


I went to Syncthing.net and they didn't mention iOS or Android.

Does it run on those?


If I can ask, what is Paperless? Google is strangely unhelpful.


It's a self-hosted document management system:

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

Think: replacing paper file folders with a digital system. Supports OCR, a variety of metadata, tagging and categories, etc.

My primary use case is taxes, but for any important legal or financial documents, I throw 'em in Paperless.


I can’t recommend Paperless enough. I set up email forwarding to the Paperless domain and it automatically downloads the attached documents. The only problem I have now - I am using a somewhat older version and there’s no direct migration path to the recent one.


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


On the other hand, it should be possible for software to be done. I have never used Evernote, but I am not sure how much innovation is required in the note-taking space.


Perhaps, but setting aside the philosophical point, Evernote was nowhere near "done".

Their 'new' client software (Electron-based, of course) never even achieved feature parity with their 'legacy' client software. The mobile app wasn't exactly screamingly performant, to put it nicely. Really basic core use cases, like creating a note, typing in a title and some content, tagging it with a keyword, and saving it, required a lot more clicks than it seemed to me like it should. Hierarchical tags, while technically supported, seemed like a weird add-on that never got full support. And Penultimate -- their tablet-centric app that stored data in your Evernote account -- hasn't been updated in several years; I'm actually impressed it continues to work.

There's plenty of room where they could have built new features, if they'd wanted to. Off the top of my head, I'd have liked to see Markdown support instead of their quasi-HTML WYSIWYG editor (some versions of the thick client had a subset of Markdown-like syntax but others didn't). Penultimate would have been great if it had on-device OCR / handwriting recognition, or even just a way of tagging specific pages or page-regions with keywords.

I think there's a lot of room in the notetaking space. I'm still waiting for an app that isn't a glorified text editor or a drawing program, but also doesn't lock your data into some unparsable binary format or obscure graph database behind the scenes. I want to take notes, using a pen, on a tablet, that might or might not be text, and then I want to annotate the shit out of those notes and keyword them and cross-reference them, and I want the whole thing to be searchable and I want the handwriting recognition to not suck, and I want all of this to be encrypted at rest and in transit, and I want native clients for all major desktop and mobile operating systems.

So, yeah, I don't think notetaking is done quite yet.


One could argue that their legacy apps were pretty close to done though. If they'd just maintained them rather than switching to the current garbage, they'd probably have a lot happier customers now.


They partly broke hierarchical tags with the rewrite. If you have a tag hierarchy a.b.c and you put a note at a or b, it will not show up in the tag list. That ruined my main organizational tool.

And the limited depth of notebooks has always been just wrong, which is why I use hierarchical tags.


Software is never done if the software it runs on is never done. Making that transition is not easy, and tech debt can accumulate to the point where you have to make substantial changes. In the meantime, UI standards/tastes change. Now you're at the right spot for a re-write


Its usually driven actually mostly by hardware. Which is driven by games (and now apparently AI).

Hardware gets better so UI gets more glittery, everyone tries to "stand out" by looking/working best, so the UI "taste" changes. Or hardware form factor changes, so everything needs re-written to support it, etc.

Next hardware re-write will be some mix of AI/low power. None of the "green" energy stuff will deliver in time, nuclear won't happen in a way that is both safe and any-time-soon, and meanwhile power-hungry AIs will be battling for cpu cycles and watts with other devices.

Your devices will be very low power and the majority of modern software will be laughably ill-equipped to handle that. Or it will run on giant mainframes that look nothing like x86 desktops or even server farms, more like specialized super computers.


Any note taking software that was “done” quickly becomes not done when users requirements change. Taking notes is no longer enough. I now want to talk to my phone and have it find the note that included the info I want. Not just basic text search, but it should understand the meaning of the notes.


> it should be possible for software to be done

Not if you ask product managers


Well it was clearly too "done" coz they decided to rewrite everything in Electron


I think it was mostly THE note-taking app because it was effectively the first serious contender. In retrospect it was never a particularly inspired app.


Yeah and now we only really have OneNote, the web version of which still really sucks. You can't even search a whole notebook, just a section. And it needs to reload every day.


OneNote 2016 was revolutionary for me. Since then I’ve found it less and less usable with each new update.

I think the tension between having a good web app and a good desktop app with the same interface is difficult to resolve.


Yes the simplified version that MS made was also much much crappier. The tabs for the different notebook disappeared and much of the functionality too :'(

The syncing with Sharepoint also works pretty crap. I preferred when the database was just stored locally and I could choose where to store it.

I'd love to get a new application just like this that works like the old OneNote. Without a whole cloud backing it which locks in my information (e.g. Evernote, Notion etc). Just a file (or collection of files) I can store locally or even in a local git server or whatever. But with options for attachments and cross platform.

I haven't really found anything good. Most of the things are not WYSIWYG but markdown with a double pane (one for the input and one for rendered) which I don't like - I'm not a dev so I don't really idolise markdown or have the muscle memory for it.


I’ve looked and it seems that one can still install the old 2016 OneNote. I still have a cd key out there somewhere. I’m going to give this a go.

I still manage to save my modern OneNote files locally. I save them to my Dropbox for syncing.


You can of course yes but it's not really being updated anymore.

And I don't just use windows these days so it's not really an option for me.


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.


But Obsidian is Electron, right? Not a native app?


It is indeed Electron, but it has a much better linking story (don't even mention plugins [1]). Evernote being a native app was the last thing the held me as a paid customer with them. Also, the move to Electron was quite bumpy, they simply dropped half the features and it didn't recover until well over a year into the migration.

[1]: https://blacksmithgu.github.io/obsidian-dataview/


Yes, but comparatively lightweight for being one. The devs don't use large frameworks like React and write pretty barebones JS. It shows.


What's the beef with Electron?


Usually high resource use - more RAM use, using the processor more while idling, etc. and usually poorer integration into the OS in terms of look and feel and in terms of actual integrations.

eg. native Outlook - ~200-250MB RAM use, same email open in Outlook Online-based New Outlook/Project Monarch: 400MB, and Monarch isn't even Electron but a supposedly lighter architecture.

Microsoft To Do (UWP): ~100MB

Todoist (Electron): 300MB

The RAM usage adds up, especially on older hardware.


Any way to import or view things to archivebox on mobile?


I have an Apple Shortcut to append a shared URL to a request https://domain.xyz/add?url=$sharedUrl

To view things is trickier. But the Readability and Mercury destinations render best.


Can Obsidian record voice notes?


There's a plugin for that (trademark icon) https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Audio+recorder


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?


I only have anecdotal information, but my wife worked for Evernote and was let go as part of this acquisition, along with the rest of the marketing team.


Agreed, no disprespect to OP, but where are the confirming sources or figures?


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/


I never stopped using the Notes app in my Apple computer and phones. I know it lacks a lot of features that typical HN reader thinks is a must-have but the fact that I don't have to worry about feature creep and crazy monetization schemes is a strong enough motives that keeps me on this ecosystem. Plain text FTW!


You also don't need to worry about running it on Windows or Android!

But yes, if you are already locked in to the Apple ecosystem, free and pre-installed can be hard to compete with for a large set of users.


I see that as a feature, in that it removes the temptation to release a cross-platform Electron app that runs anywhere and feels awful everywhere.


I can't see on your features page whether you have a proprietary format and to which degree I can easily export my notes & data.

Evernote being a cautionary tale, I think you understand why no one would or should move their notes to closed system.

Being based on Markdown means notes are stored somewhere in the file system, like Obsidian?


The actual content of your notes (we call them cards) is Markdown and is stored as such, but the source-of-truth for the notes themselves is our servers (not in the file-system), as our priority is providing a seamless experience on all your devices (or anywhere with a web connection), so the app was actually originally built to be "online-only". It's become much more offline-friendly over the years (your entire card collection actually is stored on your system for offline use / search is entirely offline / etc) but offline is still not 100% there yet, which is what the upcoming 3.0 release will enable.

Within the app we provide comprehensive export options[1] (you can export as markdown or as the actual JSON representation of a card that we use under-the-hood).

We also have a public API[2] that allows you to do whatever you want with your cards at any time with an API key. Currently the docs for this are still only an OpenAPI spec (and not an entirely complete one at that), but again that is something we are improving with the 3.0 release / subsequent releases.

So I wouldn't really describe ours as a closed system in the sense that Evernote was. In the case that Supernotes is ever acquired / shutdown / other black swan event for users, you should just be able to dump your cards into something like Obsidian and it will work pretty well, as we almost entirely respect the CommonMark spec.

[1] https://docs.supernotes.app/en/articles/3068672-printing-exp...

[2] https://api.supernotes.app/docs/swagger


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.


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.


I have little to offer but my acknowledgement. The "song and dance" routine of getting and new job (especially in the tech industry at least) is dispiriting, embarrassing, exasperating, and disempowering. Even with an impressive amount of skill and dedication to the interview process, the method is indistinguishable from a particularly unrewarding lottery.

I'm sorry, you're in this situation. Eventually, as you said, it will end...


I appreciate the kind words; I was feeling particularly upset this morning, I'm feeling a bit better now.

I know I'll find a gig soon enough, and I have enough money saved to survive for quite awhile, but I guess just the dozen or so rejection emails I get every morning are getting to me.


> 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

Maybe its really obvious you feel that way and you should find a company that has a product that resonates with you so you don't have to fake it.

> You can't just do a task because you want a paycheck

You can but don't be expected to be paid high end tech salaries for it.


> Maybe its really obvious you feel that way and you should find a company that has a product that resonates with you so you don't have to fake it.

Easier said than done. It's not for lack of trying. I apply to lots of companies where I actually think that the project is cool, but they don't respond back to me. At that point, what exactly am I supposed to do? Just completely exhaust all my savings until I find my dream job?

I do really try my best to "get into" whatever the company is doing, but it's exceedingly difficult for me to do that, and it's even harder for me to fake enthusiasm.

> You can but don't be expected to be paid high end tech salaries for it.

That's fair, and maybe I should expect it, but it's still exhausting and I don't have to like it.


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.


For anyone who may not be aware, Apple Notes can import Evernote .enex files. The process was mostly painless, and I’m glad to be rid of the Evernote dependency.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793


While I happily sing and prance in Apple’s “Walled Garden” and have done so for over a decade, I feel uneasy about putting all of my notes in Notes with no easy export option.


You can use Exporter from App Store to export to markdown notes.

https://itunes.apple.com/app/exporter/id1099120373?l=en%26mt...


You can AppleScript the contents out if you’re desperate, but there’s a SQLite database that you can pull the data from as well IIRC.


Notes isn't as good as Evernote, not even close.

However, it's "good enough" for most people, and free.

One of the greatest bag fumbles in SV history imo.


They lost the plot when they started selling Evernote-branded socks (and other accessories). No bugs smashing, better search or faster/more reliable sync: flush with VC money, the smart guys at Evernote decided that Evernote-branded socks was what their users really wanted.

I still have a few Evernote-branded Moleskine notebooks lying around. They came with a 3 month voucher for Evernote Premium, I think. Anyway, heavily discounted on Amazon, it was almost cheaper to combine the notebooks with vouchers than to subscribe online.

And then you had all the different apps, like a recipe app. My God, all the apps. Complete waste of resources, complete lack of focus.

When the VC money dried up, the penny dropped. Prices were hiked, new subscription tiers with artificial limitations were introduced, management changed, but by then the writing was on the wall and I switched to alternatives.

Being one of the first 1000 Premium users, I still feel bad about the loss of my second/forever brain, though.


I can't wrap my head around socks as "merch." How madly visible.

And an Evernote branded physical note has to be some kind of ironical statement. I'd hang on to that as a memento.


The increase in subscription pricing was the thing that got me to cancel my subscription. Hearing about the layoff of the staff makes me glad I did. Notes works just as well if not better than Evernote for my needs.


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 :/


Why would you invest?


Let me guess: options were going to expire?


No options. It’s secondary equity from EquityZen.


Ah. Ouch.


How did you buy it?


EquityZen


Even though Evernote is a competitor, it's still sad to see such a giant in the note-taking space go down so badly. Of course, I am still skeptical about this news and whether its actually true since no source has been linked.

Aside:

I work (and lead the development) on Notesnook, an end-to-end encrypted, open source alternative to Evernote. Since we are based in Pakistan, our pricing has been really competitive at just $4.49/mo (compared to $17.99/mo of Evernote). And best of all, we have one of the best Evernote Importers around: https://importer.notesnook.com/

If you'd like to learn more about Notesnook: https://notesnook.com/

Feel free to ask me any and all questions!


How is it possible to offer unlimited storage?


Also, do you have a plugin so you can save an email directly as a note from desktop Outlook?


I got that one on JustDo.com ; it is more of a tasks/teams management tool. But might fit your usecase.


Notesnook looks promising! Does it support note history / versioning?


Yes! Every edit session is saved separately and can easily be restored.


Oh wait, why note history is local only? Can you make it synced as well?


Great, I'll give it a try :)


Does it have OCR for images?


As far as I can tell: No, and the roadmap doesn't include anything for adding it. I think it would actually be pretty much perfect for me if it did have OCR.


I use Obsidian for note-taking, but Evernote for my "digital shoebox" of receipts, PDFs, photos of wine labels, insurance statements, etc. They are all quickly findable through a combination of OCR and tags.

Does anyone have a good alternative for this use-case?


Evernote alternatives for your 'digital shoebox'/'paperless office'.

JOPLIN:

Browsing through alternativeto [1], seems that the obvious replacement for a hosted 'non-tech' offering is Joplin [2] - a free, open source direct evernote competitor which includes Evernote import feature and cloud syncing.

PAPERLESS-NGX:

For the whole paperless office, scan/store receipts and PDF paperwork, I've been seriously looking at Paperless-NGX [3]. Downside is that you need to sort out self-hosting. Upside it's free and looks amazing for achieving a 'paperless office'.

Found this on exporting from Evernote to Paperless-NGX [4], but its not definitive.

Has anyone done this already? Would love your advice. Demand is out there for someone to write up a good guide on this.

REFERENCES:

[1] Alternatives to Evernote - https://alternativeto.net/software/evernote

[2] Joplin Open Source Evernote Alternative - https://joplinapp.org

[3] Paperless-NGX (Selfhosted paperless office) - https://docs.paperless-ngx.com

[4] Discussion Evernote to Paperless-ngx - https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/120mmo1/evernot...


Joplin doesn't have OCR built in. There's third party Joplin plugins for OCR but I don't know how well they work.


If you're willing to self-host, I've found Paperless to be quite good:

https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx


Apple notes. The ocr is pretty good.


For single use Notes is ok. I’ve been struggling sharing notes with my wife. Some of the notes would never appear on the other device, and it’s been like this for many years, regardless of the devices model and the OS version.


Apple stores these unencrypted with government access by default, FYI. Opt into e2ee to disable that.


I've been using Stack for a few years and like it a lot. Downside is that it might go to the Google Graveyard someday. Partially mitigated because the app mirrors PDFs of all my uploads to Google Drive, but not sure how much metadata that includes.


On phones Microsoft lens has free pdf OCR scanning. That and Onedrive would probably work. Instead of tags you just put keywords in the file names. I'm not sure how well it would handle photos of wine labels.


If you are on Mac/iOS devonthink is good alternative for it.


I think now Apple’s Notes app does this right now.


It is perhaps worth noting that spoon bending is a scam from the 1970s.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending


I love the idea of of these guys being bought out by a bunch of people who managed to somehow make a fortune bending spoons (Not Uri Geller!).

Like in 30 Rock how NBC is owned by the Shinehart Wig Company.


I moved to Standard Notes a while ago. I like free things for basic things like notes, but was happy to pay for E2E Encryption to support what they were up to. I think I got a 5 year licence for $150 which was not outrageous. I just looked up their current prices - $80 a year which means I'll migrate back to Joplin soon.


I guess their target market are people that really never want to worry about their notes being leaked, and are willing to pay a premium for that.


Yeah I'm on a grandfathered plan of $50USD which still seems steep.

Unsure what I'll do next.


> How they intend to do that without any staff

Contractors from cheaper cost of living countries, I expect.


They laid off all the employees based out of Chile too.


intend to do what? acquirer probably has no intention of keeping the app running. just reaping whoever subscribes as profit, and having no opex


They probably intend to keep the app running. And nothing else.


Bending spoons is based in Italy. So probably, yes.


Not that I doubt this, because it seemed inevitable to my outsider eyes, but do you have any proof of that?

I’d recommend getting off of Evernote anyway due to trends. However, is there evidence that this is newly urgent?


Heard directly from impacted employees. 30 to remain of ~300 pre-acquisition. 98 laid off today. No press release, which is why I’m saying something, but you should be able to find people posting on LinkedIn about it.


Wow. Assuming that’s all true, good luck, ex-Evernoters! I hadn’t used your stuff in ages, but I’m sure lots of worked hard to make something nice.


Honestly new features is something I would go away from, not pay for.

Apps these days treat my device as something created so that they could update on it, not so I could use it. I would pay to "freeze the 2009 versions on my devices forever". Software that just works.


> How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about.

Bending Spoons has a product and engineering team. They may have concluded that they don’t need the staff from Evernote to take the product to the next level.


Seems unrealistic to me. Evernote's backend platform sure has to be pretty substantial (and legacy!) and managing and operating these types of platforms does not seem Bending Spoons' forte.


For the poor few still using Evernote, there are many great alternatives now available:

Notion is the obvious one: https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-not...

Amplenote was heavily inspired by early Evernote: https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-amp...

Reflect is another up and comer: https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-ref...

And of course Obsidian has its many evangelists, though the sharing situation with Obsidian leaves something to be desired.


So many of these comments echo my sentiment around Evernote. I used it for years and was a huge fan, until they reduced functionality and increased prices. I got a new device, couldn't sync my devices, and realized there were many great alternatives. Exported to Joplin and haven't looked back.


This was my impetus to finally close my account and delete my data.

I was holding on to it because Notion's import sucks and would only import a few notes at a time, so I had to do a lot of different imports to get all the notes in all the notebooks, and I wouldn't be surprised if I still missed a few. (I have lots of notes — virtually everything I wanted to remember and keep forever, I put in Evernote.)

I'm a bit sad because Notion is a fundamentally different product and sucks on mobile. It has all the features I'm used to from Evernote, and notes with attached images imported well. I had a lot of notes with a scanned document attached and a brief explanation of what the document was, so that was vital for me.

RIP Evernote. It was an amazing tool, and it served me well for over a decade.


Depending on what you value in Evernote, Notion may not be the best replacement.


Not sure about the veracity of this, but it is in-line with how people said Bending Spoons operates at the time of the takeover: they buy up apps and then raise prices to try to squeeze more cash out of the existing subscriber base while also cutting costs by firing development staff.

Seems like an almost inevitable end.

Evernote was a great app once upon a time. I'm still not aware of anything that works quite like it. Unfortunately they decided to take too much outside money, which put pressure on them to grow revenue by finding new kinds of customers. They started adding "team" features that no one wanted (work chat?) while neglecting the core features everyone relied on. Prices went up.

Nothing left to do but move on.


I just copy pasted all my notes into Obsidian, which doesn’t constantly nag me to subscribe


I really love Obsidian, I still have some major blockers.

The git plugin is dangerously broken. I've had pushes from different computers overwrite one another. It doesn't show merge conflicts - it's happy to plow forward. I've reduced my usage since that happened. This is a huge problem. I need to have confidence the backups and merges aren't destroying notes.

There's no easy way to open multiple workspaces simultaneously. I want to start using Obsidian for work, but I'm not going to share or subset my private notebook. If I want to switch to the team workspace, I have to close my personal workspace. Only one can be open at a time, and that's awkward.

If these two problems get fixed, Obsidian will become my end-all, be-all organizational software.

I will pay a lot of money ($100/mo!) for this to work right.

(Final minor nit: I'd like to include multimedia, but use Git LFS or another cloud storage system. I don't want them in git.)


Genuinely curious: what's the problem you're trying to solve with Git plugin that the official Obsidian Sync [1] doesn't solve natively (besides cost)?

I've been using Obsidian Sync for a year, and it works flawlessly for my use case. Is syncs not only notes, but also configuration, plugins, allows creation of multiple vaults, works on mobile, fine-grained control over which folders to sync in each device, and even allow controlled sharing with collaborators. Oh, and full encryption with user-provided key, which is a must. All for $96/year.

[1] https://obsidian.md/sync


great to hear that it works, but it is hilariously expensive for what it does.

When the price comes down to $3/month, I'll start paying for it. Until then, I'll use Syncthing for free.


> hilariously expensive for what it does

What Sync does is not only "sync", it also helps Obsidian remain profitable and 100% user supported. Subsidizing costs in pursuit of growth is what got Evernote here.


> * it also helps Obsidian remain profitable and 100% user supported...*

100x this.

More than paying for a feature, subscribing to Obsidian Sync is a great way of sponsoring the project, and hoping that these folks are successfully enough to make a living and continue to pay their talented engineers for as long as possible, without going down the rabbit hole of VC funding and stock market.


I use syncthing. A lot. Best thing ever.

I used evernote a long while ago.

How can i bridge the divide between all devices between those too ? In a way that is cross-device and helps with notes/tags etc ?

I suspect you are keeping a specific folder of random files as your note taking location ?


yes, I use obsidian and I have several vaults, and each is its own directory that is synced independently using Syncthing to whichever devices need to be able to access each vault.


I have obsidian on my iphone, ipad, and windows desktop all synced across devices to a single private github repo. You do not have to use the git plugin. I use Working Copy app on ios devices and the free github desktop on Windows 10.

If you want multiple workspaces, you can create a separate vault that is backed by a different private github repo.


Could you perhaps change something in .git to fail in case of conflict?

What do you mean by using git lfs but not wanting files in git? Generally you should be able to use git lfs with any note app that supports git as long as you are able to enable lfs on whatever server you are using and are able to edit .gitattributes. It's just git with a bit of logic to only download the needed revisions of binary files instead of the whole history. But as far as I can reason, there's no practical difference if you're not often editing the binary files which you add because there's usually only one copy/no patches for the binary files.


Vaults are workspaces and you can open multiple vaults simultaneously. You can also copy the .obsidian folder over so you don’t have to rebuild from scratch. But you do have to maintain manually.


Out of curiosity, what's the rationale for using git? Is it to get a history of notes or just for sync? If it's the latter, I believe obsidian has a paid offering for that, or one can MacGyver it with syncthing.


You don't even need to macguyver really. There may be some potential conflict issues, but you could probably put the obsidian vault directory inside of dropbox, apple cloud, etc (I'm doing this with apple cloud, but I really only use one device)

Maybe a little bit of Macguyvering to add backups is a good idea


> you could probably put the obsidian vault directory inside of dropbox

I've done this and it seems to work fine.

In theory I guess you could end up with sync conflicts if you are literally editing the same note on two devices at the same time, in which case Dropbox will create a "Conflicted Copy" which will pop up in Obsidian so you can resolve it manually.

But in practice, because Obsidian saves pretty much constantly, and Dropbox syncs pretty much constantly, in a typical connected office use case you don't run into this much. If you work offline a lot, you might need to think about a more structured workflow (i.e. using Git). But for me it wasn't worth the hassle to commit/push every time I wanted to switch devices. Dropbox (and presumably the many Dropbox-like folder-sync tools) worked fine when I was testing it out.


I'm doing this with Google drive over Autosync and mostly it is fine. Occasional merge conflicts where it generates an extra file that is the other version, but I just run winmerge. It helps if you are careful about syncing and don't use obsidian in both places simultaneously.


With git you are less bound to a specific provider and your "software driver" is simpler and more standard


The git plugin allows you to disable it on certain devices. I enable it only on my main computer and sync the vault among devices with syncthing, which I find much more reliable than wholly relying on git.


I was a user since August 2008 and became a paying user shortly afterwards, it had fantastic OCR which never failed to amaze when I showed it to people. I used to be one of it's biggest fans, always demoing it to friends and colleagues and got a company I worked for to use Evernote for Business back in around 2014 and it was around this time when things started to go wrong.

Notes I synced from a Windows Client disappeared, the Android app regularly had problems syncing and often had to reinstall the app and sync everything again. They rewrote the Web App with less functionality and it was a lot slower. Evernote Business was just confusing for a regular user.

There was a period where they just appeared side tracked with too many shiny projects, Evernote Food, Skitch, rewrites to apps that previously just worked. It eventually got to the point that I just could no longer trust Evernote, notes were just not on my devices and features I used weren't there anymore.

I have been searching for a replacement for years. I am now using Notion, but there are some big missing features for me:

Offline sync in phone apps, OCR, Location, integration with a scanner.

I stopped paying for Evernote around 4 years ago, after being a paid subscriber for over a decade. I gave it a try again about 18 months ago but it was still slow, so gave up and started extracting the data I needed.

It's sad to see a product that I used constantly and recommended so much, disintegrate into an unusable product due to poor company decisions.


Moving to plain-text and markdown a few years ago was my best decision. I encrypt all my notes and store them encrypted on GitHub. I don't want my private data to be handled by unprofessionals.


I know some of the folks at Bending Spoons, and I'm quite confident that they'll manage to get something good out of Evernote - eventually. It's a team of smart folks that so far has managed to get all of their apps right.

I don't think there was an easy/painless way out of this though. Evernote has been agonizing for years, it placed too many wrong bets, its developments had basically stalled for the past 3 years or so. It faced the dilemma of how to appeal its base of power users who wanted tons of powerful features (Feedly/RSS integration, search engine snippets, HTML scraping, IFTTT rules etc.) for free / affordable prices, while developing new features that could also appeal a wider userbase and justify a subscription, all while staying profitable in the process.

It wasn't an easy problem to solve. Me and many others realized it a while ago, and simply moved on to other solutions - from Pocket to save links, to Instapaper to keep an organizing list of scraped content, to Notion for all kind of extra integrations, to open-source solutions like Miniflux, Wallabag or Nextcloud Notes, or even Obsidian.

I wish the best of luck to the new Bending Spoon adventure. I'm sure that something good will come out of it, but it'll probably not be an app that I'll use anymore. Competition in this field today is much fiercer than it was a decade ago when Evernote was the undisputed king.


This is sad. Evernote was phenomenal and I really loved it, years ago.


Especially when it was a C++ application, not C#.


Why did they rewrite?


probably for developers' sanity :)


It was only a matter of time.

Great software in the early 2010s, when it had no good competitors. But with the software quality decline, dubious decisions by the last 2 CEOs, and intense competition, it was bound to die when interest rates rose.

I recommend downloading a copy of your account data immediately.

Notion has an easy Evernote importer. Obsidian import is much more convoluted, but can be done. Or you can probably download your notes as .enex and import them into the old Evernote client to use offline.


Sorry for the staff who’ve lost their jobs. I did a phone screen with one of their recruiters a couple years back. They told me they couldn’t afford my (slightly above market rate) salary, but went on and on about how the company enjoyed a very “comfortable” work life balance. WLB is great, but I’ve never had a recruiter spend so much time on that and so little on the “exciting” product/role. That was a red flag to me at the time.


I was there when lifehack blogs will continuously talk about a newly released note taking app(Wunderlist, Evernote, OneNote, etc.)

After trying several apps, including evernote, it felt they had too many features that made them too complex for my simple use case.

After trying several methods, my stable workflow is: - Dropbox markdown file for year long notes. - Google Keep for (shared) checkbox lists & multimedia notes. - Unread emails + snoozing for TODO tasks.


Markdown in Obsidian is all I need for notes. Everything else is bloat.


Would that not be a great idea... Create an Obsidian (or Chrome, for that matter) plugin where everyone can add scraping plugins that uses e.g. Chrome instrumentation to scrape out your content based on the SAAS walled garden you're using, and dumps it in a set of .md and .jpg/.mov files.

So I could that way dump out my Tinder chats (I don't use Tinder, but I imagine you can chat there?) just as well as my Youtube videos, my Evernote notes, my Todoist tasks, etc.

A meta tool. Let's raise some millions and push the content into our own walled garden. Just joking.


obsidian is worth looking at imo


Now I want to set up a Patreon or Go Fund Me to fund an open source web clipper by those who worked on Evernote’s.

I’ve never really found anything that worked that well.


That was my favorite part of Evernote. However, I was recently cleaning up old notes that I had transferred to Obsidian and few of the pages I had clipped were ever read. It turns out I was just hoarding.


That’s where I think coupling a web clipper with audio transcription, CLIP, & an LLM, can provide a lot of value.

Have everything automatically classified, tagged, semantically searchable, and linked.

This way when I, for example, write down a new idea about LLMs, everything related is automatically surfaced, including those Langchain and LlamaIndex tutorials, and the notes I’d left about them.

Same thing when I look things up.

And I think this "autopilot" aspect will drastically simplify the usage of tools like Obsidian & Roam.

It won’t replace careful curation, but I am convinced it can be better than what most have (ie Notes, bookmarks, sticky notes, etc)

Perhaps that’s what the guys over at Quivr[0] are trying to do, but I haven’t gotten the chance to try it out yet.

It’s such an obvious use case.

[0]: https://www.quivr.app/


Have been using notes on macOS, works great. I do worry that notes are stored in a proprietary format, would love to have a backup in markdown...


It's my concern too, Apple only makes it easy to export as PDFs. There is a third party tool that can export to markdown[1].

I wanted to point out as well that notes works really well in the browser these days. Good enough to use it on windows, not sure about android though.

[1]http://falcon.star-lord.me/exporter/


How can I download my notebooks on a free account? The internet says to use the desktop app, but I can't log in there without upgrading.


Go to https://www.evernote.com/Devices.action and remove devices you don't use. You should be able to have one main device, and desktop app needed for your export.


Ah, that would explain it. I've run into three fairly major bugs in about as many weeks. It's like they're not doing regression testing at all, and rather than fixing bugs, they just keep rushing out new "features".

Problem is nothing else fits my workflow as well as Evernote does, but looks like I likely won't have a choice. Guess it's time to give Joplin a try.


Now official: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/evernote-layoffs-moving-...


I remember when Evernote launched and everyone was super hyped about it -- even some of the biggest VC names promoted them. Not to mention the funding they raised ($290M). It was literally iOS Notes on steroids. I even used it for awhile, but somehow it didn't stick.

They hired bunch of great people and had some good backend tech -- sad to see this happen to them.


Didn't Evernote precede Notes? My understanding is that Evernote was the first "notes" app, but I'm old; I could be making shit up in my head.


Evernote preceeded the Iphone, the product was originally a non cloud small business that I think was sold/ spun off into a venture capital funded company.

Evernote is older than the Iphone.

I just checked and I found a review of Evernote 1.0 from 2007, but I think the product predated that review. I found a web site saying the first Evernote Beta was released in 2004. I remember using Evernote in grad school in 2008.


Older than...Lotus Notes?


Short story about Lotus Notes: Back in high school, a friend of mine started writing "code" for Lotus Notes; can't remember what the "code" was called, though - templates, plugins, something like that. Anyway, he started selling his stuff; first to accountants and small businesses (his dad was an accountant), then he started selling to local banks (in Modesto). His dad used to do all the sales, and my friend would go along to meetings and just sit there. Then, he sold the "code" through magazine ads. Finally, he somehow got connected to corporations in San Francisco and started making a ton of money (for a high school kid). Last I heard, just after we all graduated high school, he moved to San Francisco to start a full-time company. I have no idea what happened after that. Steve, I hope you did well. ... His situation taught me two things: (1) you could use computers for more than games. And (2) a "little guy" could start a company and actually make money with software.


Yes, it preceded iOS Notes. Evernote started in 2004.


I'm still using Evernote. It's become painful. Does anyone have a recommendation for a comparable service? Perhaps one that'll allow me to port everything over easily? ;)


I've migrated away from Evernote when they converted their MacOS and iOS apps from native to "Electron based". Simple things you expect from a "note taking app" to handle, like, search through text files, or "selecting multiple notes" were severely limited due to the technology limitations.

You could only select 50 items per time in the new "javascript" based desktop version, because that was too much state for react to handle.

The other thing that they broke was the apple pencil support. Using it would result in several seconds of latency.

I was a paying customer at this time, I've canceled my subscription entirely. I checked the app a few times after that to see if they managed to improve anything, the didn't. It only got worst.

So, if you have a native app, you have a moat with it, don't ruin your only opportunity to stand out.


Ha. Interesting reading through the comments. I recently downgraded everything in Evernote after seeing that Evernote was reporting 3 different service tiers for my account in different places. I kept getting nagged to re-up. I finally did and in the process, with a HIGH degree of intention, selected the "monthly" slider fully planning to cancel my account while salvaging some of the notes.

Lo and behold, unbelievably, Evernote somehow still charges me the annual rate. Absolute transaction dark pattern happening in there somewhere/somehow.

This is after a long sequence of ineffective exchanges with support regarding my tier, and also a long period of being a customer (10 years?) and seeing basically zero feature development in line with long-running community requests.

Net/net: I'm done with Evernote. Just ain't working for me.


THIS APPEARS TO BE UNSOURCED.

There's a TechCrunch article about layoffs of 129 people in February, a Wikipedia edit today (July 6) links to that implying that it's happened now instead of 4+ months ago and also states (unsourced) that the 129 is more than half the remaining staff (the article link was retrieved today but is from Feb). The price increase referenced was announced in April 2023 and took effect in May so also not new.

The Wikipedia article has now been updated to reflect the above.

Edit: I see that OP has noted that it was heard directly from affected employees, with 98 gone and ~30 remaining (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36619945)


My main use case for evernote was for storing recipes for cooking -- the web capture archiving on mobile or desktop was quite nice.

Whats a good alternative for this? Apple notes?

Can obsidian actually do this?

Sad to lose this.

Also if anyone wants some veg cooking recipes I have 270 of them for a limited time


> How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about.

A company I worked for did the same thing. They got rid of basically all of the staff and just outsourced everything to cut costs. I'd assume that's the plan here.


They don't. And it's quite simple, and to be expected (because after a acquisition this happens every. single. time).

Bending Spoons only bought the assets, code, architecture and brand. They laid off the entire staff because ALL of Evernotes operations are taken over by Bending Spoons.

The same thing will, for example, also more than likely happen when finally Adobe manages to merge with Figma. Why keep the Figma staff on payroll if you have more than capable staff yourself?


Every time in the last 5 years that I drive by Evernote Building on the 101 - I was shocked it was still in business. With Apple Notes chipping away at its core, and stiff competition from Notion - how long could it survive?


Evernote was briefly interesting, but they managed non-Windows clients so poorly and kept playing feature-creep calvinball so badly that I gave up on them YEARS AND YEARS AGO.

Basically, TIL that Evernote still exists. Sorta.


At the risk of I told you so, it was always a stupid idea.

Any service like this that "requires the cloud," but is personal or individual and could be replaced by completely non-cloud software WILL go obsolete.

Obsidian, et al understand this.


Services that rely on local storage are vulnerable to their own data loss scenarios as well as being much less convenient.


If you can use a basic hosting with backup features, you can simply use a $5 droplet to sync almost everything possibly you can think of. Or OneDrive / Google Drive if you are using Windows based applications with databases. It is really not that difficult to keep data safe and backed up.


I mean, yeah, if for some reason you think Google Drive is safer than Google’s purpose-built notes application, that is an option.


As a backup option. Not their entire service. I tend to think heavily encrypted files could be safe there.


Or much more convenient, given that the data is local and almost always available without the vagaries of an internet connection and remote server (except if/when all the bad local data loss scenarios happen at once and you need to restore from your cloud backup).


Maybe your circumstances are different but I find myself without any device capable of getting online at practically no time in a typical day, and in the few scenarios I do, keeping them on one device wouldn’t have helped.


It's so odd that comments like this actually still get made on Hacker News; this is SUCH a solved problem, and yet people still make it likely because it pays someones bills, despite being trivially easy to solve.

Anyway, syncthing, among others.


Evernote lost me when they changed the UI and made it take 5 taps/clicks to do what took 1 before. Was happy paying for it until then.

Now apple notes has replaced it. I tried obsidian as well but like notes better


Notion is great at migrating stuff out of Evernote.

I recently logged in and saw that upgrading to their new interface logged me out of all other devices unless I pay them.

They are starting to nickel and dime instead of innovate.

Evernote is dead.


I moved to Notesnook about 6mos ago and have been pretty happy with it. The founder is active in Discord and shipping new features about every 2wks. It's E2E encrypted and open source so you can self-host if you want to. I used their Evernote importer to move all my notes and it worked about 95% accurately (only formatting that didn't transfer correctly was the checkboxes): https://importer.notesnook.com/


So do you get unlimited notebooks and tags when you self-host?


I think some users want all the features and everything for free.

Evernote works well for me. It fully syncs all my notes between 2 devices. Those are my home and work computers. That's good enough for me.

If I want to look at a note on a mobile device, I use a browser in desktop mode. However I only had to do this a handful of times in all the years they went down to 2 device syncing.

I just have to deal sometimes with an offer to upgrade. So I close the popup. No big deal.


Evernote lost my note when I tapped on an email notification in Android in ~2011. Nevernote for me ever since. How. in. the. heck. do you call it Evernote if it loses your note when changing apps?!


For Evernote users, it is time to look for alternatives and migrate their existing notes. The best alternative to Evernote is Zoho Notebook. You can find out why on this blog https://www.zoho.com/blog/notebook/why-is-zohonotebook-the-b...

Please ask away any questions that you have.


Let's assume they shrink from 300 to 30 employees. After some time they adjust internal processes, focus on the original goals and main use cases, weeding out unnecessary features, and having stable applications for Desktop, web & mobile. 30 people should be sufficient to maintain & support & maybe even improve it a bit for a long time given a healthy revenue stream from loyal customers.

Not sure if something like this ever happened in the history of software. :)


> How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about

There are great note-taking apps that only a few people work on. Tana, Obsidian, Bear, UpNote come to mind, but there are many more. So it's definitely not a problem. It sucks for the old Evernote staff, but it doesn't have to suck for users, it might even be what Evernote needs, since it's pretty ancient in its feature set compared to the competition.


I was a paid user for many, many years. I helped them when they opened the Austin office, and find folks. I liked Evernote. Like 2 years ago I canceled; bugs and the features/functionality didn't justify the cost when apps like Apple Notes (free) just do the trick well-enough. This remind me that I still have content in Evernote that I need to get out (when I tried the 1st time was kind of a pain to do that).


Evernote was critically valuable for me but has degraded steadily and sadly for years now.

I began my Obsidian migration a few days ago and it's encouraging.

I found the evernote2md project on Github (https://github.com/wormi4ok/evernote2md) the best way to get from ENEX->md files with good resource references. Joplin wasn't getting it done.


I've been "trapped" with evernote for a long time because I put more than a decade's worth of stuff into it, and their exporting tools are shit. Literally I "exported" whole notebooks and what I got was just the titles of notes and no content. Ugh. Guess time to just sit down and spend a few hours doing tedious, tedious tasks for a while. Notion and Obsidian are great though.


Have you tried Notions Evernote importer? There are also quite a few Evernote to X applications exporters on Github


Do you have recommendations for exporter that preserves the notestack/notebooks?


The hard thing for me is getting an good exporter from Evernote to some .md kind of file, plus images. I searched a lot and Notion was the only alternative but there's a big hassle between "connect to evernote > export each notebook individually > import to notion > export from notion to .md" and after that 30% of your notes is still missing.


I’ve concluded that markdown in git is the way to go. Trusting longterm Knowledge to stay put in some VC funded growth SaaS is insane


I find having to push, pull, and heaven-forbid even write a commit message for notes to be asinine. Sync should be automatic and instantaneous if one uses multiple devices.


Y not use Obsidian and a plugin to do those git commits for you.


Is there a good free alternative which would sync between mac and iOS that doesn't require iCloud? My company is blocking iCloud.


Craft (https://craft.do/) has a free version that supposedly works well now (after they removed the limit on how many blocks you can have). I'm using their pro version thanks to the SetApp (https://setapp.com/) subscription (highly recommended), available everywhere, mac, ios, web.


Sounds like I'd better migrate my Evernote to somewhere else.

What's a good alternative that plays well with my existing Evernote data?


And for that reason I'm out. What a shame.


I tried Evernote when it came out ~2005, but it never got rid of its rough edges. There were some neat features but they were overshadowed by bugs and glaring gaps in functionality. Tried it again ~2010 to see if it improved, but it was still a no-go. ): It was always an over-hyped app.

I'm currently migrating from Apple to Obsidian.


Joplin felt like the OSS spiritual successor to Evernote for me. It’s in markdown, has a mobile app and you can self-host.


I suppose I had better hurry up and finish building https://stickerdocs.com then. If you like the EN concept but want something privacy focussed and a honest company to support you on your journey, you might want to sign up.


I am playing with the old versions of evernote from old version.com and it brings back so many memories and hopes of what the old web could one day become.

I changed the evernote web back to the classic version, and that also made me reminisce about the old days when I used to be more productive.

Those were the days.


All commercial software is rented. It's already been created and the marginal cost is Zero. You are ostensibly paying for bug fixes and new development, which is at least partly true in many cases. SaaS at least admits a rental model.

Free Software is rent-free, but development may be slow.


Wrong. You're conflating on-prem and SaaS commercial software together as "rented", when the former can be delivered as a perpetually working product whereas the latter isn't.

FOSS isn't free to host, accessible to users of all experience levels, doesn't necessarily include support, and isn't guaranteed to have a license that isn't hostile to its intended use.


A possible way to migrate from Evernote to several different apps: https://www.popsci.com/diy/evernote-alternative-export/

(I have no affiliation with any of these).


I like to add, since I got slightly organized after getting my ADHD under control, you never ever price-silo your workflow as then its locked away to be leveraged against you.

Personally, I use vscode with a combo of zettelkasten and kanban boards which works quite well even for those with ADHD!


I loved Evernote. And then they decided to make fancy and expensive notebooks, pens and paper and stopped working on the product itself, or so it seemed. They really lost focus. And then the price changing.

It was a wonderful product in the early 2010s.


Why is Anytype https://anytype.io/ not on this page somewhere? It should be.


Spent the last few days trying to find a hosted (paid) service that does PDF indexing. Check out https://notejoy.com/


Posting as a lover of the tool, but reflect.app is my new love-affair with note-taking. Evernote has been far too bloated for far too long. Reflect is an amazingly well built product with an awesome team behind it.


I'm personally using the Nextcloud Notes app, it covers my own needs pretty well and I have it installed on a couple of Android devices as well.

I wonder what you would suggest is the most valuable feature of proprietary solutions?


Had a nice interaction with evernote a few days ago. A hacker had logged in on my Evernote account, received an email about a login.

What stunned me was that I had to confirm by mail, but the hacker from Taiwan didn't have to.


Looks exactly like the follow-up to an "Our Incredible Journey" post.


What is your source for this?


Not sure of OP's source, but a friend of mine worked there for several years and can confirm. He got let go, too.


Thanks. Sorry for your friend and to see a longstanding company devolve into this situation.


Timely thread about Joplin, an open-source alternative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611355


When I once updated Evernote in 2015 and it got worse, I just reverted and never updated again. I've been using the same version of Evernote for over 8 years for free and it's amazing.


Wild that Bending Spoons doesn’t even list Evernote as an app they own. https://bendingspoons.com/


Microsoft being allowed to leverage its enterprise word/ppt/xls trench and bundle OneNote/Teams without anti-trust regulators batting an eye is what kills these companies.


Evernote's server side technical stack is nightmare. This is definitely for better, to completely replace it with something modern and adequate.


I've been an Evernote user since 2008 and a paying one for most of that. The other week I tried to go through some old notes. Half of them wouldn't load. Looking to leave now.


I don’t know where to store all my tons of scanned paper documents to be automatically OCRed, searchable, and accessible on all devices :( Do you know any other solutions?


I am so glad I migrated off all my notes from Evernote, their limitations and popups triggered some red flags I was not willing to risk.

This proved me right, thanks!


Wow, they even doubled the price of the personal plan..

I use it occasionally but to that amount it's not worth it. I need to figure out a way to export my data and then I'm out.


> If you’re still using Evernote, probably a good time to stop.

I doubt many people do anymore, which is probably the reason it's being dismantled. Sic transit gloria mundi.


is it possible that staff had some type of vesting rights in an acquisition that layoffs would terminate? (Yeah, it's not a nice thing to do, but the buyer has the leverage and no loyalty to the past, and they they call the shots in terms of sweetening the deal.) if so, Bending Spoons may plan to keep investing in product development, but they want to do it at market rates, not bonus rates.


- What is the best way to export Evernote into plain text?

- Is there a good way to export the notes so that it preserves stacks and notebook structures?


> How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about.

They will probably use their Italian in-house dev teams instead?


We do have Notion (and alternatives), who needs Evernote now ? Evernote should have an exporting tool to import into Notion instead.


Notion is markdown formatted text only right?

Big difference with a full wysiwyg notebook with attachments. Afaik notion only does images. Devs love markdown but regular users don't.

But it's been years since I tried notion so perhaps this has changed.


> But it's been years since I tried notion so perhaps this has changed.

It has changed dramatically.


Hmm I'll try it out but I don't know... I don't really like cloud hosted stuff for this because it's very hard to liberate the information if I need to change (which, for the provider, is also a feature of course :) )


I feel like any product that competes with free ones and does not have a technical wall is going to fail eventually.


There are ways to import data into other apps such as Logseq or Obsidian, so I'd search for an alternative now.


AFAIK, Bending Spoons is a company that successfully launched a couple of mobile apps and they know how to make a living out of it.

According to an engineer who works for them and who I know, it’s a very demanding and stressing environment to work in. Probably they simply plan to throw more work at their existing employees.

The plan was to buy Evernote and make it profitable. It wouldn’t surprise me if they kill the project if it turns out not to be profitable.


I think they BUY mobile apps.

Their modus operandi seems to be:

1) Buy successful mobile app.

2) Increase the prices to insane amounts.

3) Profit off of the people still using the overpriced app.

4) Use the profits to buy another mobile app.


Sad ending for a great product. I've been using Simplenote since 2015 and it's been refreshingly consistent.


Thanks. I just exported my notes and deleted my account. Between this and Reddit, tis the season to cancel accounts.


Subjectively, the app has improved its offline mode and cross-device sync since the company has been acquired.


I can't believe people made >= $1 billion from a note-taking app that loses data.


Personally, been using OneNote for over 10 years. Never jumped to any other hyped note-taking app.


If you buy into a cloud service this risk should always be top of your list.


one long plain text file is all you need.

easy to back up and replicate if need be.


Can someone tell me a better way to export Evernote content?


I used cloudhq to migrate out many years ago. Looks like they're still in business.


Replaced it with Joplin a year ago. Very happy paying user.


Wow, I thought people stopped using Evernote in like 2017


Is there an easy way to just export all my stuff?


Which alternative note taking apps offer a web clipper? I just found

- Evernote

- Onenote

- Notion

- Joplin

Are there any other?


feels like notion is gonna be the next evernote


RIP.


tomboy/gnote




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