Why I left Evernote for Notion after 14 years – and a 900% price creep

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• This saga shows how new AI features can mean new costs.
• Be careful when you look at tiers and pricing structures.
• Evaluate your alternatives regularly. 

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By intermingling new AI features into Evernote and charging me more for the privilege of having them, as well as other dubious improvements, Bending Spoons has fallen completely out of touch with me as an Evernote customer. After being a loyal subscriber for over 14 years, I’ve left for Notion. Not only is the tool a better alternative, but it also offers better value. 

To me, this saga of my Evernote-to-Notion migration is also part of the larger conversation about the degree to which AI should be incorporated into the hardware and software we already use, and how we as customers should be expected to pay for it. As you will see, Notion offers AI features. However, it has cleverly architected its application infrastructure to make these features only available to higher-paying customers. 

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In other words, for existing Notion users who want the traditional utility of Notion without the infusion of AI, they can have it at a free or reasonable price. On the other hand, AI is now part of all Evernote versions, and customers are expected to pay more for it, as well as the improvements that other software companies traditionally made to their wares to remain competitive.

Evernote once offered amazing value for little to no cost

Under a freemium model, I discovered Evernote back in 2012 when I realized that Microsoft’s OneNote wasn’t up to the task of keeping all of my thoughts, notes, photos, and favorite web pages organized in a way that was searchable and synchable across all of my devices (today’s OneNote is much better at this task). 

You could even email pretty much anything to your Evernote, and using the subject line, tell Evernote which of your notebooks to use to store the contents of that email. I loved emailing PDFs to my Evernote. For example, whitepapers, instruction manuals, and musical chord charts. The software runs on all major operating systems and the web. For me, Evernote was like pure oxygen compared to other notetaking apps. 

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At one point, the namesake company referred to it as a better version of your brain than your actual brain. And to me, that tagline held very true. Even as the company pared back Evernote’s freemium features, I was happy to pay the annual subscription cost, which, as a Plus tier user, was, at one point, $25 annually. At that price, I just kept loading more stuff into Evernote. Whenever my real brain forgot something (which was quite often), my Evernote brain was there to save me. 

I became a Rocketbook user and exported all the notes I handwrote into Rocketbook notebooks — including ideas written in musical notation — into my Evernote. The searchability, even of handwritten notes, was astonishingly good. 

Then came the email: Evernote now $250 per year

I always felt like I was getting more value than what I was paying for. Eventually, the company knew it too, and changed its fee structure, but not by much. By 2018, I was paying $37 per year. The price doubled in 2023 to $74, and I was still happy to pay. But then, one year later, the annual fee leaped to $138, and I was starting to feel a bit of a pinch. At $74, the tool still offered a great value. Yet at $138, it was beginning to feel like one of too many other $100-plus subscriptions that I was paying for on an annual basis. 

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I also felt like I was locked in. Evernote always felt very proprietary, and so much of my life was locked away in it that I never considered breaking the addiction. While the cost bothered me, the fear of the application disappearing altogether due to some unforeseen circumstances (vendor financial difficulties or otherwise) was even more worrisome (Bending Spoons wasn’t always the vendor). I couldn’t fathom losing over a decade’s worth of notes. 

But then came the straw that broke the camel’s back. In December 2025, I received an email saying that the price for my usage tier would rise to $250. I was stunned. I realize that everything is more expensive these days. But what was once $25 was now 900% more expensive.

A partial screenshot of that email appears below, and as I studied it, I realized why I didn’t qualify for the $99 Starter edition: 

At the time I received the email, I probably had over 20 notebooks in my Evernote account. I’ve since deleted some of them and am down to 19. But as the table shows, if you want to keep more than 20 notebooks, you cannot select the Starter plan. 

In my personal use case, some of my notebooks can be temporary. This is particularly so when I’m researching multiple topics simultaneously. In situations like that, I might create several new notebooks (one per topic, which would put me over the 20-notebook threshold). Then, I might delete some or all of those notebooks once my research is concluded. 

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More importantly, the 20-notebook limit was not a restriction in the past. It seemed rather arbitrary that Bending Spoons would charge more for the number of notebooks since, based on how relational database management systems work, organizing all of my notes into 10 or 100 notebooks shouldn’t impact the company’s cost basis.

But the biggest and most surprising change was storage. As shown in the screenshot below (taken from my account before the new pricing went into effect), the Evernote tiers were structured around the number of gigabytes you could upload monthly, but not the total storage you used: 

At the time the screenshot was taken, storage availability was unlimited, and I hadn’t yet used any of my monthly 10GB upload allowance. However, under the new plans, you get an incredibly paltry storage limit of 1GB for $100 per year or, for $250, you can get unlimited storage. 

For storage pricing comparison’s sake, $100 per year gets you 2TB of storage from Google. That’s 2,000 times the storage that you get from Evernote for the same price. Even worse, if existing users like me aren’t sure whether to go with Evernote’s new Starter or Advanced plans based on storage requirements, there’s no obvious way to tell which tier you fit into. I searched high and low in the Evernote user interface, and couldn’t find any indication of how much storage I was currently using. 

In other words, based on storage alone, I have no idea whether I can get by with the Starter plan. While I’m pretty sure it’s not Bending Spoons’ intention, it sure felt like the inability to determine storage easily was manipulating me toward the Advanced plan.

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As it turns out, neither the number of notebooks nor the storage limit mattered because it’s the number of simultaneously synced devices that left me with no choice but to elect the Advanced plan. One of the cool things about Evernote is that all your notebooks (and the notes within them) are synced to all your devices. I could create a new note on any of my multiple computers, my phone, my tablet, or through the web interface, and all of them would automatically stay in synch with one another. 

Yet as the chart above shows, this syncing capability is limited to three devices, and exploration of the Evernote interface reveals that the web is counted as one of them. Not only am I already over the three-device limit of the Starter plan, but I was about to add two more devices, putting me at a total of six.

Evernote’s response

Disappointed, I contacted the Evernote team at Bending Spoons to understand how exactly they could justify such a sharp increase in subscription pricing. The response, which mainly mentioned improvements to Evernote, was unconvincing. 

“In 2023 and 2024, we executed a complete refactoring of Evernote’s underlying code base to bring all our customers greater speed and reliability,” wrote Rebecca Shamritsky, who works in product communications for Bending Spoons. “We introduced real-time editing, a brand new metadata sync process, and lightning fast web downsync — plus we made note, notebook, and tag creation and syncing significantly faster.”

I thought this statement was odd, because it essentially implied that the former product had speed and reliability problems that the company shouldn’t fix unless the customers foot the bill. In my more than 30 years of tech journalism, I’d never experienced anything like it. 

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“Between 2024 and 2025, we introduced over 200 new features and improvements. These impact every part of the product — including product areas like AI tools, Calendar, and Tasks that weren’t available back in 2018,” Shamritsky’s email continued. She went on to say that “a handful of the most appreciated improvements” include a modern new desktop user interface, a new mobile default landing page, several editor improvements, accountless collaboration, custom navigation on desktop and mobile, two-way calendar sync [with Google or Outlook calendars], and a complete overhaul of Evernote Tasks. The newest version — Version 11 — includes an AI assistant, semantic search, and AI-driven transcriptions and summaries of meeting audio (something that all major video conferencing programs already do).

In the email’s only paragraph that I agreed with, Shamritsky stated: “Together, these changes have repositioned Evernote from ‘just’ a note editor, into a comprehensive productivity and knowledge management tool, complete with a native task manager and powerful in-app ChatGPT- and Granola-like capabilities.”

Yes, Evernote has repositioned itself. Given its pricing, it has repositioned itself far from the beloved digital version of my brain that has long been one of a handful of simple, clear-purpose software products that I was happy to pay for and often recommended to others. Now, it’s an expensive solution with a collection of features that overlap other organizational and AI tools I already use, and, at $250, it is irrelevant to me, given that another product exists that much more reasonably gets the job done: Notion. (I contacted Notion for comment on this article, and the company never replied. But it hardly mattered.)

Switching to Notion was seamless

Notion offers a free tier that includes unlimited storage. The company also provides a free import-from-Evernote utility. I tried this tool, and all of my Evernote notebooks and their notes were flawlessly recreated as databases in Notion, with the only caveat that some notebooks exceeded Notion’s 5MB import maximum at the time of import. To solve that bit of friction, I paid $12 to upgrade to Notion’s Plus plan for one month, and then downgraded to the free version after I finished migrating all my notebooks and notes. I’m pretty sure the free plan with unlimited storage and an unlimited number of ‘notebooks’ and notes will be enough to satisfy all of my requirements. 

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About the only thing I noticed in the paid plan that could eventually be of interest to me was that Notion’s search facility can search the contents of any PDF files attached to my notes. 

But even at Notion’s annual subscription rate of $120, the application is still a better value than Evernote at $99 for the Starter plan, let alone $250 for the Advanced plan. Perhaps the best thing about Notion’s four tiers of service — Free, Plus, Business, and Enterprise — is that if you really need all the whizbang AI features, you can get them in Notion’s Business tier, which, at $240, is still cheaper than Evernote’s Advanced tier. 

In other words, Notion isn’t holding my number of supported notebooks, storage, or synced devices hostage in a way that forces me into accepting all its new user interface improvements, performance fixes, and AI features at an exorbitant cost. But Evernote did. And for that reason, it has lost me forever as a paying customer.