Remember Evernote? The note taking service was acquired in 2022 by Bending Spoons, an Italy-based maker of mobile applications. Back then, Evernote was said to have 250 million users and a revenue of about $100 million per year.

Usage may drop significantly in the near future if Evernote is going ahead with its plans to limit free plan users of the service. Up until now, free users may create multiple notebooks and notes at the service. Free users may upload 60MB per month to the service and individual notes are limited to 25MB.

The first commercial plan, named Personal, is available for €8.33 per month or €99.99 per year. It adds unlimited device synchronization, larger monthly upload and note size limits, Google Calendar integration and other features to the note taking service.

Testing the limits

Evernote is testing a limitation of the free service currently. According to TechCrunch, free users that have been selected for the test are limited to 1 notebook and 50 notes in total. The change would impact many free users of the service, especially those who have used Evernote as their go-to note taking application for years, or even longer. Our first mention of Evernote here on this site dates back to 2008.

Bending Spoons confirmed the "limited test" to TechCrunch and revealed that nothing has been finalized at this stage.

This is not the first time that Evernote limited free accounts. Back in 2016, the company announced a price increase and new free user limits. Plus and Premium services were raised to €29.99 and €59.99 per year respectively. Free users were limited to syncing notes between 2 of their devices and the 60MB per upload limit was introduced in that year as well.

The official plan comparison on Evernote's website does not include information about the test at this stage.

The company told TechCrunch that the website has not been updated as the changes are not final and that the tests were run on less than 1% of the free userbase of the service. Existing users won't lose access to their notes or the ability to edit, view or delete notes. However, they won't be able to add new notes to the service if they have reached the 50 notes limit.

Free users may migrate their notes from the service to less-restrictive note-taking services. There is the open source Joplin app, which does support imports of Evernote notebooks. Other options include Logseq, NotesMan, Elephant or QOwnNotes.

Now You: do you use a notes taking application?