Productivity app Evernote has slashed its premium subscription rates amid reports of a flurry of key staff departures at the startup.
An annual membership for the productivity suite now costs $42, down from $70, provided customers pay the fee in one lump sum. Monthly premium subscriptions remain at $7.99 per month (almost $100 over a year), so the deal is worth looking at if you're a long-time fan of the app.
According to TechCrunch, the productivity app has lost several of its most senior executives in the last month, including CTO Anirban Kundu, CFO Vincent Toolan, CPO Erik Wrobel, and head of HR Michelle Wagner.
Evernote has not commented on the departures, but one source claiming knowledge of the matter told TechCrunch that "Evernote is in a death spiral... Paid user growth and active users have been flat for the last six years and their enterprise product offering has not caught on."
Evernote used to be ranked as one of the most popular productivity apps in the App Store, but its popularity has gradually waned with the emergence of rival (and free) alternatives such as Apple Notes, Google Keep and Microsoft OneNote.
Top Rated Comments
It’s a really solid product and I’m sorry to see them struggling. Tough business to be in.
Microsoft provide an importer to migrate from Evernote to OneNote (download from here ('https://www.onenote.com/import-evernote-to-onenote'))
Their security failure that led to account details being compromised followed by the competition improving (OneNote and OneDrive is a powerful combination for professional/student use, Google Keep & iOS Notes good enough for lightweight uses) and the writing was on the wall from then on.
I understand their desire to push people to Premium, but the basic free tier was far too limited in terms of app functionality and the number of concurrent devices it could be used on, plus no offline syncing and barriers were thrown up that might have allowed people to develop a habit they might consider paying for.
I’ll be sad to see them go but the product/application and the company are not what they were during their heyday under Phil Libin.
Add to that the weak support for handwritten notes (having to use a separate app and not being able to mix hand-written and typed content in a single note) and I dropped them several years ago in favour of OneNote.
I have kept looking back at it in the hope they had improved it, but it doesn't really seem to have moved on at all