Evernote introduces new pricing structure: Basic remains free, Plus for $2.99/month, Premium for $5.99/month
Context & Ripple Effects
Evernote is formalizing a three-rung freemium ladder — free Basic, Plus at $2.99, Premium at $5.99 — giving the company a cheap entry point above the free tier for the first time in this structure. The move matters because it sets the baseline that every later Evernote decision gets measured against.
That arc ran fast: within about a year Evernote pushed prices up again (Plus to $4, Premium to $8) while cutting free-tier device sharing to two devices, Microsoft attacked directly with an Evernote-to-OneNote import tool claiming 71 million pages moved on Windows alone, and the company ultimately ended up sold to Bending Spoons in 2022.
First-order effects
- Users choosing between tiers now face a $2.99 decision point: Basic stays free, but anyone needing more than Basic features pays something, widening Evernote's paying base at a low price point.
- Premium subscribers get their $5.99 rate locked in as the anchor price — the level from which all subsequent increases are framed as deltas.
Second-order effects
- Competitors read the pricing ladder as vulnerability: Microsoft's later importer tool is a direct play to convert Evernote users who chafe at the free-tier limits and rising paid prices.
- A sub-$3 entry tier invites the classic squeeze — once users are anchored to $2.99 Plus, any meaningful hike (like the 2016 jump to $4/$8) doubles as a churn trigger that rivals like OneNote can harvest.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, freemium productivity apps treat introductory pricing as temporary scaffolding: the low tier exists to build a paying base, then prices ratchet upward until the product's value proposition — or ownership — changes, as Evernote's path to the Bending Spoons sale illustrates.
- The broader structure points toward consumer subscriptions being repriced continuously rather than set once, forcing buyers to treat note-taking tools as recurring cost decisions instead of one-time purchases.
The trend: Consumer freemium services are using cheap entry tiers to build paying bases and then steadily ratcheting prices upward, trading early adoption for later revenue per subscriber.