Evernote’s Customer Hostile Upgrade Scheme

Do you think Evernote would like me to upgrade? You have 2 choices here, upgrade or stop syncing. Stop syncing is framed as a negative and if selected won’t result in the user being able to continue to create notes. You are held hostage until you pay.

I wrote or meant to write about how I’ve let certain long term cloud accounts lapse because they no longer filled any pressing need. Evernote was one of them and up until this morning I experienced no real need to keep paying for either of the 2 premium tiers.

My understanding of the premium tiers was such:

  • It provided me with online storage thereby allowing my to access documents across devices, and have an alternative backup to my desktop backup scheme.
  • Text recognition
  • Downloadable notebooks which are useful for storing travel data

In the past if this wasn’t useful to you, you could just keep using the free account with no syncing to other devices. Well no longer.

This morning I was attempting to see pdf’s from a lecture I am watching, Kentaro Toyama’s excellent simplified introduction to affinity diagrams, when Evernote informed me I could no longer use the web clipper because I used up my online storage. No problem, I’ll just create a note manually and it can sync next month. Unfortunately Evernote would have none of that and refuses to let me add a note even if disconnected from the Internet.

I must have missed the email notifying that Evernote has gone completely subscription based. Even worse as you can see from the screenshot, they are absolutely hostile in their approach, ostensively blocking access to your notes until you pay the fee.

I’ll be sending them a complaint and will search for a more customer friendly provider.