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.
So basically, they are following enshitification same as many companies have been doing.
Soon to be purchased by:
A) Meta
B) Microsoft
C) Alphabet
D) Some venture capital firm nobody who uses a computer daily has ever heard of
Place your bets now people!
How many people had heard of Bending Spoons before they bought Evernote? They’re a software company but I’d never heard of any of their apps before, either.
I heard of Bending Spoons because I read an article about an unknown company buying mobile apps, raising prices to insane values, and milking existing customers. Then using that profit to buy another app and repeat.
Than I forgot about them until they bought Evernote.
I only heard of them because I wanted to move to Italy and they were hiring and relocating DevOps engineers.
I didn’t apply but that was first time I heard of them like 2 years ago.
IIRC they wrote the italian COVID app, “Immuni”
That sounds familiar. I remember being impressed by then because Italy is not known for its tech sector (my brother in law here just learned about docker etc for example even though he’s a system admin) and they seemed pretty current on tech.
I had never heard of them before this post.
It was already acquired recently (less than a year ago) by a shady Italian company.
All that lovely text based data on there, I’m sure some companies are salivating at the idea.
Jokes on them, even when I had an account I encrypted all my notes before putting them there. I do the same on Google Keep.
Why would MS be intereted in Evernote? I guess they could incorporate something into OneNote, but what would that be? Are there any technologies worth buying in Evernote?
They bought Wunderlist and Sunrise Calendar. Why wouldn’t they buy Evernote?
I feel like they were some of the leaders - they’ve been making their product worse while charging more to use it for years
Higher interest rates mean every company has to be profitable ASAP or they’re deader than bed bath and beyond. Gonna keep getting uglier
Evernote has been profitable for many years.
In case anyone is looking for a recommendation, I started using Obsidian for taking notes recently. It creates markdown files which keeps things nice and clean and then I use Syncthing to sync my files rather than their paid sync option. If Obsidian ever enshitifies I can either use an old version of the application or switch to any other markdown editor.
I’m considering having some sort of nightly sync to a git repo as well for version control but that might be more complexity than I need.
I recently moved to logseq and I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
+1 for logseq. It lowered my barrier to writing new notes.
Just add a hashtag of the topic and start writing to your daily journal.
I use Obsidian in the work laptop because they don’t allow any cloud tool for confidentiality and I like it a lot.
For personal stuff I’ve been using OneNote just because its free and has clients for almost every system I use.
Using Obsidian + Google Drive.
Been using Obsidian for a bit less than a year. It’s been great for what I need it to do - take notes because I suck at keeping facts and data straight throughout my day.
There is a git plugin for obsidian that works really well, and is pretty simple to setup. I use it to backup the notes and it can be configured to commit every x minutes.
Those looking for an alternative, I suggest Joplin. I exported/imported from Evernote a few years back and am really happy with it.
- supports markdown
- can store data on multiple services
- Open source
- can fully encrypt your notes
I use nextcloud notes, you get all the above mentioned benefits + Nextcloud
The Joplin client supports Netxcloud installs too.
Nextcloud is nice, but it’s kinda slow. To be fair, I gave it two vCPUs (not gonna call 'em cores, because they’re not full cores) and 2GB RAM, so part of it might just be weak hardware, but tbh it’s not like I, the literal only user, stressed it much. Also a huge annoyance is that switching from one module to another does a full page reload.
I have it on shared hosting… it’s borderline unusable
So do I. Works fine. Might be your service.
That is one big issue with nextcloud. They keep adding features and with each release it get bloated.
👍 for Joplin. It’s nice to configure it with WebDAV directly with Nextcloud for replication and sync.
I switched from Evernote to Joplin several years ago and haven’t looked back. I had over 8,000 notes in Evernote and now have over 11,000 notes in Joplin. I’m using free Dropbox storage for syncing (3GB out of 6GB free) and run Windows, iPad and Android clients. I haven’t missed Evernote at any point.
I second Joplin. I love it, and I use it all the time.
This 100%! I switched over years ago and have been very happy using it on my desktop computer, laptop as well as my phones.
I forgot Evernote existed. Time to back up my notes from 2014.
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Looks interesting. Would love to know more about the people behind it. A lot of trust to put in some anonymous devs with a new app
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Had a quick look. Although the ui is “pretty” usability wise it’s not intuitive at all and needs a lot of work imo.
I’d like to learn more about this. I’m a notion user myself but a few weeks ago I was looking into alternatives and didn’t get anywhere. What’s your elevator pitch?
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No worries! I’ll look into it some more!
I’ll leave these here for those fleeing Evernote:
https://github.com/akosbalasko/yarle
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/migrate-from-evernote-to-apple-notes/
I haven’t used either, I never really used Evernote, but a couple people have been posting them as a good way to get your notes migrated out of the app.
Better alternative: Joplin
Works much the same way as Evernote with a similar layout including a wysiwyg editor and a web clipper. However, you can host your own server or sync it to a cloud platform of your choice (or both). Doesn’t cost you a thing and is open source. Has an Evernote importer too.
Apple notes can lock you in. Bear or Obsidian maybe a viable alternative but I’m not sure with migration if a seamless import is available.
Oh yeah, Evernote used to exist, forgot about that.
A former employer bought a lifetime subscription to Evernote for me, I forget why they did that some perky new manager wanting us all to collaborate or something. I used it for notes when learning Spanish if I recall. A few years after that they canceled it and said I had to pay so I deleted my account. I entirely forgot it existed until reading this post. That’s the end of my Evernote story.
Lol, similarly. Is been using it since just after our came out. Once they started removing features behind a pay wall, especially emailing notes, I quit and forgot it existed.
Wow. I ditched Evernote after their last price
gougeincrease, and that’s after being with them from the very beginning. Thank God I bailed when I did.More enshitification
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Obsidian is not FOSS.
I’m surprised to not here more support for Standard Notes around here (which to @[email protected]’s point is a FOSS app).
Logseq also looks interesting though I haven’t tried it.
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Interesting, I don’t remember what the old UI did better. I was pretty frustrated with them for some of the bugs that came with the new UI though (which seem to mostly be fixed now).
I might checkout Notesnook at some point, I’d realistically like to see their code audited though and a few more years of them being around. It would definitely be the first software I’ve used knowingly out of Pakistan and I’m not familiar enough with Pakistan politics to know what kind of implications that might have on the security of the product.
(Granted, Standard Notes is out of the United States, and as patriotic as I am, I don’t trust my country to uphold privacy rights so… Maybe that’s insignificant, an audit would regardless still be nice)
I tried Joplin for a little while, after having tried others. Found myself going back to VSC with Markdown preview.
But once I tried Obsidian? Aww yiss.
The first I’d heard of Obsidian was at the same time I heard about the Zettelkasten method. Which was thanks to having stumbled across this video: The FUN and EFFICIENT note-taking system I use in my PhD
It’s been a while since I watched it, so my apologies for not being able to give a TLDW summary.
Since adopting it for myself, I’ve found out that an old semi-retired dev friend, as well as a younger dev that actively contributes to at least 2 projects on GitHub (both popular) are keen users of Obsidian.
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I forgot this app still exists… Who’s using it anyways? Its interface feels like it’s desperately trying to catch up with other note taking apps.
I had an abusive internship over a decade ago that used it and I’m still able to see all of the corporate logins from that job listed in plain text, so that’s one fun use case.
Same. I used it a TON in college over a decade ago and had completely forgotten it existed until this post.
“We’re definitely going to use the extra money to help you, not as a cash grab and run for the hills… LOL, suckers! Shit, the microphone was still on.”
Damn it. I’ve got a lot of stuff on there, organised and tagged.
I’ve thought about migrating for the last couple of years, but just left it as I couldn’t be bothered.
If it’s getting more expensive though, this might be the time to move.
What would be the service with the easiest migration path? Ideally one that:
-
has good automatic OCR of all documents uploaded to make them searchable
-
has good apps on Android, Windows and IOS
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has a good import function that can retain tags from Evernote
That may be asking too much?
Sounds like Obsidian is a great alternative
One other important thought to add to my own comment.
If I’m moving to a web based service, longevity is important. Nothing lasts forever, but if I move to another solution and migrate everything and they go out of business in 6 mths, that would suck. So it matters that where I move to is fairly solid and sustainable.
That’s why I hoped that Evernote would keep going, they charged a reasonable amount for the service.
But I guess in the commercial world it’s all about constant growth rather than sustainability…
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Obsidian is love. Obsidian is life
