Evernote Owner Bending Spoons Eyes Paid Service Expansion Amidst Restructuring

Earlier in the year, Evernote experienced significant staff reductions, and now Bending Spoons, the Milan-based company that owns it, is trialing a bold strategy to escalate user transition to its premium services. The company has been conducting a small-scale trial that imposes restrictions on the amount of content that free users can generate, though the details of this new paradigm are still under review.

The experiment came to light when one Evernote user encountered a pop-up notification while logging in, detailing that unless they opted for a paid subscription, the free service would confine them to maintaining a solitary notebook and 50 notes only. This cap would drastically affect heavy-duty users who have amassed a vast collection of notes throughout their use of the app.

Curiously, Evernote's website did not reflect this significant alteration in its free service tier, continuing to list the standard limitations such as the 60 MB monthly upload allotment and a 25 MB cap on individual notes' size. The page highlighted the benefits of paid personal and professional plans, such as extended note size, increased upload volume, and multi-device syncing, currently priced at monthly rates of $10.83 and $14.17, respectively.

The absence of updated information on its website is attributed to the proposal's tentative status, as stated by Evernote. The outcome of testing this modification with a subset of less than 1% of free-tier users will decide its permanent implementation. Should Evernote solidify this plan, it will roll out communication to users through all relevant channels.

Despite the constraints on new note creation that free users might face, Evernote assured that all other functionalities pertaining to their existing notes, such as access, editing, management tasks, exporting, or deletion, would remain unaffected, even for those exceeding the new limits.

Yet, if enacted, this could signal a significant shift for Evernote aficionados accustomed to its non-premium services, compelling many to choose between upgrading to a paid subscription or abandoning the application. The proposed changes could ultimately lead some users to seek alternative note-taking solutions such as Microsoft OneNote, which offers up to 1TB of cloud storage at a competitive monthly fee, or Notion's collaborative environment, which still provides a complimentary individual user tier.

Prior to Bending Spoons taking over in late 2022, Evernote had grappled with maintaining a competitive edge, suffering a series of high-level executive departures and seeking to diversify its product line with physical goods in collaboration with Moleskine and Pfeiffer and its own office accessories. The company even downsized its workforce by 15% in 2018 before securing $100 million in recurring revenue under CEO Ian Small, who took over from former Google executive Chris O’Neill. Notwithstanding, Evernote struggled to keep pace with rising contenders like Notion.

Upon acquiring Evernote, Bending Spoons, also known for its portfolio of creative apps such as Splice and Remini, opted for another workforce scale-down, excusing the move by alluding to a long-standing lack of profitability.

The introduction of these changes may also signal a strategic retreat from Evernote's free note-taking offering as the pressures for sustaining a profitable business model mount.