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Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
1025 points by baron816 11 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 614 comments
Its acquirer (Bending Spoons) has taken over operations. They’ve also hiked subscriptions prices and told customers they intend to use new revenues to pay for new features. How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about.

If you’re still using Evernote, probably a good time to stop.




I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did.

Evernote was great. Honestly, it was worth paying for. But they gave away the farm too early, and folks feeling like what they had was being taken away from them spurned a lack of trust. Obsidian made the smartest play by giving you the editor, keeping the files outside of a database so that they're portable (so they feel safe if they ever have to move away), and telling you that if you want to own the sync story that you can, but you can pay to have the cohesive experience on every device.


I think it’s an example of trying to charge for things that are low value, and, more importantly, low cost.

Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having an app to easily edit those files is super cheap.

It was free in the beginning because this is a “classic” software problem where it’s cheap to develop and close to $0 marginal dollars for a user.

When Evernote started charging for dumb features and locking in my notes, I switched to one of many free, open source, or very cheap alternatives.

I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then pushed up prices, and customers mehhed out.

The lesson here is to do something valuable or do something cheap. But don’t do something not valuable and expensive.

Sync is nice, but notes can be easily synced everywhere by layering on top of Dropbox or iCloud or whatever. I don’t want custom Evernote sync and I especially don’t want to pay as much as Dropbox for it. Id rather just pay for Dropbox and then toss in a bunch of files.


> I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then pushed up prices, and customers mehhed out.

This is the problem with most VC funded startups. You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees. When it comes time to actually make a profit, these companies struggle because the value proposition simply isn't there for what they're offering.

Take GrubHub and DoorDash for example. Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction? No. But someone has to pay back the billions spent on useless corporate bloat and thousands of employees.


> This is the problem with most VC funded startups.

At one level I shouldn't care. The VCs burn the money, the users make a bad choice to rely on something that will inevitably disappear when the profit-seeking crunch comes, not my problem.

But it's unfortunately for all of us because all this human energy (from users, developers) that gets wasted over and over on doomed-to-fail proprietary solutions could be so much better spent on developing, using and promoting open source distributed solutions that can stand the test of time.


On the other hand they’re paying us handsomely to tilt at these particular windmills.


Yeah true. Being laid off sucks, but let's just say a few friends I had at Twitter are taking a very nice vacation with no rush to start re-applying. Can't be said about most non-tech jobs experiencing layoffs.


> Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction? No.

To be fair, it’s only “an ordering system” if you look purely at pick-up ordering. For deliveries, these apps are two-sided real-time resource schedulers (allocating a driver to N orders they can efficiently deliver through pickups and drop offs on a single precalculated connecting route to optimize both time and fuel consumption.) The value is in the backend software, as the very same backend software should be reusable for e.g. routing driverless taxis.


I interviewed at doordash, they really pride themselves on being able to optimize when a driver gets to the place to get the order to maximize everyone's time and not have useless waiting. It's NOT an easy problem and they had a huge prediction engine per store/item.

Looking at problems naively it looks simple but it's -really- not that simple if you want it to do WELL.


> Take GrubHub and DoorDash for example. Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction?

While I agree with the sentiment, it is worth noting that the 30% helps cover the delivery-person’s cut. Ideally, there should be a fixed cost courier charge, but that’s tangential to the point here.


In general I would agree but the hardest part of any success is getting the word out there.

Especially for double-sided markets like food delivery where you have a chicken and egg problem - why providers sign up when there aren’t users and why would users sign up when there aren’t any providers.

That’s a human problem, not a technical one, and is the expensive bit.


> You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees.

You are just looking at the tip of the iceberg. Being essentially a CRUD app doesn’t mean it is less complex than other software. This is similar to saying “Facebook is just a web site, I could make that over a weekend.”


That is repeatedly said about twitter and reddit


I agree that many of the features they were adding were useless (to me), but I disagree that you can encompass what they do with the description of storing and editing files. Their value was in the removing any concern a user might have about where a note is, both in terms of which device, and where on the device. There are a bunch of ways to sync and edit files, but I don't want to spend time or brain power on that, I want to capture bits of information and then be able to find it again without thinking about it. What I was buying was simplicity, reliability, ubiquity, and speed. They screwed up because they didn't seem to realize that was their core value proposition.


I feel like something more subtle was at work too. Much of my Evernote uses were just clipping Web pages to save for later or organize and search later and at some point I no longer did that. Why not? Well, I can take a few guesses. I graduated from college, for one. But also, I started reading more things on mobile devices, which didn’t nicely integrate with the clipping tool. Probably I now spend more time on social media sites than reading articles on random sites. Maybe it just got to be less trendy and exciting. I don’t remember any particular change to Evernote that made me drift away from using it.

When it comes to pure “notes” I find either Google Keep or Apple Notes are good enough and work with less effort on my part so that’s where most of my scribbles go.


>There are a bunch of ways to sync and edit files, but I don't want to spend time or brain power on that

I see what you mean. But at the same time I do have the brainpower to simply remember to save my notes into the "notes" folder, which I then sync into some cloud storage.

Or even just use Google Keep. I'm fine pasting links, copying pictures, and jotting quick notes down. I didn't necessarily need inking support on my end. Condolances to those who did, as well as other features like audio and others I can't remember off the top of my head.


> I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company.

For the owners/shareholders of that particular 1-2 person company, do they wish it had stayed one, or are they glad it didn't?


Good question which can only be answered by them. But given the amount of money they raised compared to their likely acquisition price (bending spoons has only raise slightly more capital to buy all the apps they are buying than evernote did for its development), I don't think they've walked away with much financially.


Yep. For the founders in particular though, who had the most influence early on in taking the VC path, odds are they took some money out along the way, perhaps quite a bit more than had they stayed small.


Sounds like perverse incentives? If your best coarse is to ruin your company and product to make a buck, you may as well be a telemarketing scammer or some other vulture of society that make bank off the mystery/rent seeking of others.

I have to hope that the original owners really wanted to make the best product possible and lost their heads with the power to create that they thought the investments would bring.


Theoretically it aligns the incentives of the founders with those of the VCs putting new money into the round (eg the founders are OK with the company taking more risk, because they have diversified their personal net worth somewhat). Now, the incentives of the VCs putting new money into the round, there's certainly an argument that they don't always benefit society or deliver the best possible product...


Is this typically possible? My understanding is that most VCs insist on being paid first in the case of an exit, at least to the point of getting back what they put in. Founders and employees are typically last in the line.


Yes, during the rounds where VCs are stepping over themselves to invest, founders can negotiate terms that permit them (and their employees and early investors) to sell some of their stock as part of the deal, in a secondary sale (https://rizstanford.medium.com/secondary-sales-in-vc-backed-...).


Either way, it's poisoning the well. It's a shame that many (most?) SaaS applications lack data portability. I get that part of it is it's easier to have a custom schema than adhere to an established file format (or creating a new open format). The cynic in me believes a lot of it is good old-fashioned lock-in or casual indifference to their customers' data.

That's may even be fine for some bits of data. But, for anything I want access to long-term, I just can't trust SaaS start-ups anymore. Very few acquisitions end up with a favorable outcome for the customers. Sometimes the service gets unceremoniously shut down. In other cases the app gets folded in to some other product the parent company owns. In yet others the product suffers as the parent company tries to squeeze what it can from the existing consumer base.

I have no real interest in trying to scrape my data out of a vault so I can recreate it elsewhere. Increasingly, I limit my choices to established players with a history of long-term product support (e.g., Apple or Microsoft, but not Google) or OSS. I'm sure in the short-term I'm missing out on new functionality that could increase my productivity, but I don't like the anxiety of knowing I could lose all my data in an instant and so I don't truly engage with such products. My primary concern is no longer than the company will go out of business but rather that they'll try to shoehorn a growth model that doesn't make sense for the core product so they can then sell and sail off into the sunset.

Obsidian is an interesting case where's it's not an established company and it's not OSS, but they've made it possible for you to ensure long-term access to your data. If needed, there could be an OSS-equivalent of Obsidian to read those files. But, I'm happy to just pay them for a good product. If they were to have a big exit, that's great for them and I don't think I'd be impacted very much.

The trend in software has been a move to walled gardens and there's been strong adoption there, so I don't think my mindset on the topic is a prevailing opinion. But, I have noticed family members and such have grown increasingly tired of service shutdowns from acquisitions. Expensive devices become bricks. Important data goes away. Etc.


I think that's a good point.

A common tactic now is to have this idea of lock-in. That if you don't continue to use said service you loose everything. This forces you into that subscription and makes it extremely hard to transfer and move.

I have seen many apps that lock data export behind enterprise subscriptions - that have no pricing and only "contact us".

I do think there are times it may make sense to have some unique file format (maybe your app does something special and needs that format) but there should always be a way to get that data into something more standard. Whether that's a text file, a CSV file or something else.


Apple is not a company I would trust with long term product support, at least at the pro end. It has dropped several products. I used to use Aperture, for instance, which was a great pro photography product, but it was dropped with no real exit route.

Obsidian: also worth looking at DEVONthink for similar reasons, but with the advantage that you have a choice of sync services including running your own. The database is open, but a risk point is that it uses RTFD for notes with graphics. That's not supported off the Apple platform, but there are similar risks with any method of storing notes with graphics.


> Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having an app to easily edit those files is super cheap.

Are Evernote files just plain "text files"?


Part of their problem is that they aren’t.

But they should be just text files with pointers to non-text things.

Creating a proprietary format just because is an unnecessary complexity and cost.

I used Evernote for 5-10 years and had thousands of notes. I had maybe 10-20 photographs or diagrams mixed in, but mostly it was text.

Not sure how common my use is, but they kept adding stuff I didn’t want. And it’s now a “free” feature in Apple notes, onenote and countless others.

I think the difference is that Microsoft and Apple are just trying to find efficient ways to store data in their cloud storage. Evernote was trying to find ways to make customers pay for note taking.


No. But I’ve pretty much always come back to storing text files, photos, and PDFs. It may not be as elegant a solution but it’s completely portable. Never got into OneNote when I used to use Windows for the same reason.


I've been burned by 3rd party formats - never again - plain text for me.


You can export your notes as HTML, or better, .enex files. The latter are XML, with embedded stuff encoded with base64.


Apple notes does exactly the same and free.


For me, it's an example of a company messing up the technical side.

I was a happy customer in the beginning. Until I didn't have an important note that I had prepared for a meeting, because it didn't sync to my phone. A few weeks later, it happened again. I lost trust in the app.

Then the Android App got worse and worse. It sometimes didn't sync at all. Notes would conflict all the time, and I'd lose work.

For some reason, Evernote (both android app and windows client) just seemed to get worse every year.


Exactly. I would have happily paid them 10 bucks a month in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars forever if they'd just maintained the apps and kept them up to date. Instead they focused on adding features few people wanted, and then completely rewrote the apps in Electron, resulting in a slow experience that was (and still is, years later) missing multiple core note-taking features, and is increasingly unreliable.

I kept hoping, as theoretically Evernote is absolutely perfect for my needs, if it would just work. But clearly the writing is on the wall at this point and I need to find an alternative.


Same here. I'm still using version 7 of their desktop software on OS X, now badged Legacy. It's fantastic, fast, multiple tabs (unlike the new Evernote app!!!), OCR, works well with images/PDF/Office Docs, I've never had a problem with syncing, I can format notes as I wish etc, etc.

Over the past 10 days it has started displaying a daily upgrade message forcing me to the new tab-less Electron app. I'm resisting but I've no doubt it will stop syncing any day.

Much of my daily workflow is focused around Evernote. It's going to a pain to move but I am going to. If they'd have just left things alone I would have been a paying customer probably until my dying day.


The legacy app is absolutely NOT fast if you have a significant amount of notes. Still worth using because the current app simply lacks the functionality (they "solved" the costantly freezing problem by preventing people from selecting more than 50 notes at once, for example). But certainly not fast


Electron is the single biggest scourge to end users since Windows ME.


That was what killed it for me. After they rewrote in Electron, using the app always felt sluggish, and despite the fact that it didn't actually interfere with any of my uses of it, I went from really liking their service to tolerating it as the lesser of several evils.


I'm not sure whether electron itself is bad, or if it's the fact that any company who would use it has made an executive decision to cut corners and sacrifice user happiness for development velocity (Microsoft/VS Code excepted, mostly). Any such company would put out a bad product no matter what. Electron might just be the common subpar solution that these types of companies all gravitate towards; without it, they'd probably still build bad apps, but in a million different frameworks instead of just one.


Is it really though? I feel like it’s allowing many clients to exist that otherwise wouldn’t ever get written.


I see your a quantity over quality type.

Electron is a great tool tbh, I'm not on the hate train, but let's not pretend like electron is some bastion of quality or performance. People's grievances are legitimate, and part of that reason is just how low the bar is to ship something with it. Great for tinkerers, but sours normal users.


I can remember a lot of applications just not being available on Linux or Mac and you just had to suck it up. An Electron app beats that. And it’s not like Java UI apps were so much sleeker.


Don't know about ME, but I have many native apps on my Mac, and it's jarring when switching to any electron app. It's always janky.


Isn't Notion an Electron app or just a webapp?


Fastmail is an excellent example of a very reliable, slow changing product with a consistent price. I’ve been a subscriber for over 20 years, and I’m thrilled that it hardly ever changes in perceptible ways and just does it’s job. In more recent years, they have started to introduce some changes but seem very careful about it.


I paid for a subscription because I really liked what it did and I used it a lot. The Android app became so unresponsive that it was basically unusable. I stopped paying when I found myself making notes in email again to avoid opening the treacly app.

It has since got better but I haven't gone back to paying for it, despite using it a lot, and now I'll probably slowly migrate away as they progressively break and disable the free version.


Also Obsidian is a small team (< 5 people IIRC?) and they don't have to monetize as aggressively to make back the money that VCs have funded them with.


I think this is the key issue here. There are a lot of VC funded start ups that have a good product and a solid market fit, but they were never supposed to become 500+ employee companies.

If you have a product that works and makes a good profit, and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5 more, sometimes that just is the company.

In this context I think it is important to note that Ycombinator was founded in 2005. For the majority of its existence, and the general hype of tech startups, money was incredibly cheap. Now that the gears are switching, a lot of the advice given to startup founders does not work as well anymore.


If you have a product that works and makes a good profit, and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5 more, sometimes that just is the company.

Amen. I call this business model “tiny unicorn”. Been riding mine 25 years now.


What would be the caveats of that approach?


You’ve go to know your unicorn. If it’s tiny, it’s tiny, and no use dreaming of a majestic stallion rampant when its natural environment is scuttling under the clover.


Great answer! I shall ride this pony until the wheels fall off then.


This is super-important. Sometimes the grass is greener on this side of the fence.

VCs want to get you to grow rapidly because the only way to move the needle on their returns is to blow the roof off. However as a founder, this is proof you can have a great business and a great quality of life by keeping costs relatively low, the team relatively small, just cranking out code and having fun.


As a founder you probably don’t get wealthy either and a lot aren’t really satisfied with a $150k/yr total comp/benefits for their successful lifestyle business.


As a co-founder, I'd say you can get wealthy or at least comfortable.

But, we started with two people. At some point we needed funding. That put us on a track of angel investors, VC's, and a cycle acquisition, buyback, funding, acquisition, buyback, etc.

As the techie guy, I found that tiring and distracting. When we changed from software as a product to SAAS, it got a lot less fun. When we grew to 2000 employees (mostly non-tech), the company was a pain.

So after 20 years (to the day), we sold it and moved on.


It's really nice to hear something like that from someone who experienced it.

If you were back to two people with a promising idea, how would you do it this time?


It was pretty nice to exit my startup for hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, I don’t think I’d like to settle for $150k. YMMV, but I suppose a lot of folks are taking a calculated risk and swinging for the fences.

More power to em, if you prefer software be a certain way write it yourself.


Agreed, sure I fucked over my customers after my startup was bought by Google, but I didn't really care because I was able to afford three yachts. I didn't even bother writing the shutdown message myself, I paid some dude on Fiverr to do it. Maybe 150k is fine if you're willing to settle for an above-ground pool in some shithole state in the Midwest, but if you want to spend your time where the true work happens, and collaborate with other innovators and founders in the only place that matters (bay area) you have to set your sights a bit higher.


Humans have agency. If you enter into an agreement for software at a particular price (especially $0) that’s on you.


Imagine not being "satisfied" with a ~85th percentile wage[1]. Anyone who earns more than $150k/yr should be forced to spend 6 months every 5 years working a minimum wage retail job. They can keep earning their normal salary in escrow until they're done with their "get some damn perspective" temp job.

[1] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen...


I assume someone running a very successful lifestyle business of this sort 1) Probably had a pretty good chance of making nothing at all or even lost money and 2) Could make more money with benefits etc. if they just took a job at a big company.

So, yes, they’ve done pretty well but they took a risk and still probably didn’t come close to maximizing comp even they had a rather good outcome.

And I just threw out the $150k number because it’s a very good outcome. Could just as easily be something a lot lower including negative.


While I do agree it would be good for those who haven't experienced poverty to get a taste of it, it's not realistic to expect people to feel satisfied simply because they are more fortunate than some other group. Success is always perceived relative to your surroundings and the possibilities available.


> Imagine not being "satisfied" with a ~85th percentile wage.

In aggregates: Household income > individual income > wage/salary; you've confused the first with the last.

$150K is beyond 90th percentile individual income. [0] I can’t find wage/salary percentiles separately, but its probably even further beyond 90th percentile there.

https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-perce...


I think most of the founders on HN are far above the 85th percentile in intelligence (let's not get into the philosophical arguments about it), so why would they be satisfied with that?


Because, being over 85th percentile in intelligence, they would be more likely than average to realize that the marginal impact of income on experienced utility declines sharply the higher you go on the income distribution. (Especially if they’ve experienced life at a variety of income levels, including some near the 85th percentile.)


Marginal impact decreases, but the absolute impact is still positive... And the marginal impact is still quite high at the 85th percentile of income because the income distribution is very skewed (the absolute dollar difference from 85th percentile to 99th percentile, where most HN / YC founders probably are on the intelligence scale, is probably much greater than the absolute dollar difference from 15th to 29th percentile, as an example).


You can make A LOT more money than that as the owner of a small company. If a VC firm wants to invest, it's because the company has the potential to make an absolute killing.


I'd like to agree with you, but the issue then becomes this smaller company is competing with a much larger company, which then has a larger marketing budget. The smaller company's offering becomes just another set of features the larger company offers.

It's not fair because the larger company continues to get VC funding which allows it to subsidize features or even give them away for free. Remember, all these companies are effectively racing to become monopolies and part of that process is "price dumping" to kill of smaller competitors. Again, this sucks, but those are the incentives VCs provides and companies have to oblige or get swallowed up by bigger fish.


> If you have a product that works and makes a good profit, and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5 more, sometimes that just is the company.

C'mon now. With that attitude, how are you ever going to get imploded on top of the Titanic, or buy a social media company so you can smash it against the wall like a toddler with a toy truck? You want to live a comfortable, happy life, with happy employees and customers? No way! This is capitalism, baby! Fuck your customers and your employees, it's your right to throw them into a vat of acid so you can blow millions of their dollars to spend 30 minutes in the stratosphere wearing a cowboy hat! If you don't do it, someone else will!


Yeah! I feel like I'm reading a script of an episode of the TV show, "Silicon Valley"! (ANY episode, lol!) * Pied Piper FOREVER! *


The count depends on if you include the cat: https://obsidian.md/about


They created a very robust platform based on a cross-platform framework (electron) with a healthy stable of open source add ons, and held off n a major release for some time. They really only need to water and feed it from there.


Have Obsidian taken on any VC funding?


They've intentionally avoided taking on any.


I have to say changing to obsidian has been great.

1. there are opensource tools to convert from evernote to obsidian so it Just Works [tm] and you don't lose anything.

2. My docs are now in markdown in a normal filesystem so it's easy for me to back them up, sync them, have everything work on different OSs etc

3. I choose to pay for obsidian sync because I want to fund them but you don't have to

4. Community plugins are awesome. For example I just got done editing my "Linear Algebra Cheat sheet" which is full of Latex equations. It looks beautiful, if I want to jump into vim to edit I can but editing in obsidian works fine also.


I set up Obsidian+Syncthing on my desktop+mobile devices a couple years ago and have had zero technical issues, while Obsidian has significantly improved their product since, IME. It just works AND I own my data.

It's a real gem among mountains of SaaS/VC nonsense.


I just started using Obsidian and I use the vim keybinds that Obsidian ships with. My only issue so far is I can’t move the cursor back to the title from the body.


But this also seems to be another case of tech companies trying to have it's cake and eat it too like the recent reddit debacle. The freemium model comes with trade-offs and businesses can't have it both ways. 'Free' users should be viewed as free marketing and advertising for generating paid users not as lost potential revenue.

No business using the freemium model should expect to magically convert the free users to paid users and still retain the popularity generated by the free users. You would think as many times as tech companies have that shot themselves in the foot like this our industry might stop attempting to do this. When does this actually work?


It works when the free tier is usable, but highly limited. Then it effectively becomes a free trial, albeit with no time restriction.

For example, if Evernote had limited the free tier to 99 notes and syncing with 2 devices. That’s usable enough for a user to get a feel for whether they like it or not, but without an expectation that the free tier could support all their needs for note generation and storage.

The problem comes when the free tier is so restraint-free that people begin to use it as a daily driver without ever expecting to upgrade to a paid tier. At that point, the company has boxed themselves into a situation with users who generate costs but no corresponding revenues. Trying to convert _those_ users into paying customers is difficult or impossible, in my opinion.


Sounds like Dropbox has made the transition just fine. If you’re gonna ask me to pay a tenner a month you better give me what I think is the dollars worth of value. Dropbox did. Evernote did not. At least not for the vast majority of people who barely take some notes on some rare days.


Dropbox never took away anything they gave for free though. In the beginning they handed out extra space like candies, and the accounts that got it at the time still have it.


They did though. You used to have unlimited devices syncing for free, then they took that away and made it 3 unless paid.

It's why I ended up switching to OneDrive. (Which I ended up paying for later.)


I dropped Dropbox with extreme prejudice (was a paying customer) when they decided to dictate which Linux filesystems I may use. Will never use them ever again. Randomly demanding I drop everything and re-engineer my stack is an invitation for me to re-engineer them out of my life.


Like everyone else, they have to decide what they support – their core product pretty heavily depends on known file system semantics – and they gave advanced notice specifically so you didn’t have to “drop everything” if you for some reason cannot have a partition using a supported file system.

Put another way, do you think the combined users of file systems which aren’t supported ext4, xfs, btrfs, or zfs are willing to pay more or would quietly accept the possibility of data loss? I doubt the former is true and have absolute certainty that if there was a bug using an unsupported file system that would result in angry, hyperbolic blog posts saying Dropbox is unsafe and will lose your data.


Oh are those all supported now? They've clearly backtracked massively. When I bounced they were insisting on ext4 only. Glad I didn't bother rebuild all my machines to ext4 only for them to change their damn minds. They gave us less than three months notice. I'm not playing chicken for three months paying their professional tier in the hopes they change their mind. Freaking circus.


> when they decided to dictate which Linux filesystems I may use

That’s an odd framing. How about “when they didn’t support the filesystem I use”?

If some software is only available on Windows I doubt anyone would say that the vendor is trying to “dictate what OS I use”.


The framing is not odd at all. Your framing makes it sound as if this was some requirement that had been known since the beginning rather than the typical "Good news! For our own corporate reasons we have decided to make your life better by jumping to the top of your todo list and breaking your things!" Thanks, I hate it.

To be clear it is trivial to thwart the check, but shared library shims can't fix the real problem which is pointless corporate contempt. Particularly if I'm paying for it.


They took away my "free" <huge amount of space for 2011> many years back. I mainly got the space hosting events at my university and other free work I performed for the company around that time as well as many, many referrals.


I think you’re both right because the original poster left out competition. It’s one thing to take free back, it’s another thing to do it when people can easily replace your product without paying.

Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use. At least as far as I know. You can get your disk space in a lot of ways, some bundled with other products you may use making it appear “free” but even if you host your own cloud storage you’re going to pay something for it.

Even if Evernote is better than notes on your iPhone, is it $10 a month better? Probably not.


> Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use.

Maybe not completely free, but iCloud desktop sync is pretty much a native MacOS clone of Dropbox. Especially for its core feature of cross-device syncing. Perhaps less so for sharing, although MacOS has been slowly adding those features to the point where I no longer get much value out of dropbox at all.

Still paying though, mostly out of laziness to migrate (which is literally as simple as dragging the files into a folder on my desktop, honestly I’m not sure why I haven’t done this yet)


> Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use

Google drive?


Google drive and Dropbox don’t really have the same functionality. Google really wants you to use a web browser; in my experience the filesystem integration has always been flaky. Whereas Dropbox directories that appear in the local filesystem are really solid.


I think you're right that they're not the same but, in the case of that particular example, they are.

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/10838124?hl=en-GB


On the Mac OS that functionality has always been flakey, through several rewrites, not just bug fixes. About half the time it’s not syncing (often due to crashing, but sometimes just mysteriously) on my completely vanilla macos laptop. Dropbox “just works”.


How is Google drive more free to use than Dropbox? As soon as you need any sort of storage it’ll cost you money.

You can also get some free MBs from Microsoft, Proton and so on, and, Dropbox also has a free tier.


Google Drive's yearly cost for 2TB is almost equal to monthly payment for Dropbox for the same capacity.

However, Dropbox have some underrated yet very powerful features like Apps and automations. I buy books from plethora of places, and new versions of the products I have are uploaded automatically. I just receive a notification. Same for some fonts and design assets I have. SendOwl leverages this capability for anyone, easily.

Auto organization, a clunky but reliable native Linux application, LANSync, etc. are all good things to have, and they have solved the syncing problem.

Also, Google Drive is a ticking time bomb, because if you accidentally put a file Google doesn't like, you have the risk to lose all your Google access at the middle of the night.


>Google Drive's yearly cost for 2TB is almost equal to monthly payment for Dropbox for the same capacity.

Dropbox costs €10 / user / month while Google Drive costs $12 / user / month.


For me, the prices are as follows:

    - Dropbox: $119.88 per year for 2TB, plus $39.99 per year for one year version history.
    - Google Drive: ~$11.3 per year for 2TB, ~$57 per year for 5TB.
Not in the U.S., btw.


Those are crazy low prices for gdrive. central europe i get EUR 10/m for 2TB


where's the linux client?


It is only matter of time before Google will kill it.


Jottacloud


For me, it's an example of a company building an app that did a thing well, but not a thing people would pay for. And then switching out the app for this monstrous platformy enterprisey catastrophe that I sure as hell never wanted, and being told to pay for it.

Just an endless series of features that I never wanted.


Evernote’s files are `.enex` which is a variation of html.

At least, they used to be. I haven’t checked recently, but this was the case for many years. Don’t know if they’ve changed anything recently.


If you export it, you get XML, with embedded HTML in <CDATA TAGS, among other things. But the point is the same - it's not hard to parse. It also has base64 encoded images and pdf's. Don't know what else.


> Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features

I don't think so. They had plenty of paying customers. They claimed to be profitable for a long time (eg https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/evernote-rai...). They had trouble with (i) implementing big price hikes, and (ii) a poor, bug-filled user experience. While that was going on, they were facing increasing competition, yet they acting like a monopolist. OneNote, Google Docs, Dropbox Paper, Notion, and so on were providing a quality product at a better price. The lesson is one that many HN commenters would never accept. It's possible to set your price too high.


If you're on Windows, OneNote is almost impossible to compete with. Even though it's part of the Office suite, it's a free, stand-alone download. The phone apps are free, and you get 5GB of free storage. Then, for less than the cost of Evernote, you can get a O365 subscription and get the Office suite and 1TB of storage.

Even though OneNote is basically a loss-leader, it's extremely powerful and flexible. It's been around longer than any other note-app, and it's still here as Evernote fades into oblivion.


Exactly. I'm OneNote user for last 15 years or so. I got roped it in because it was free and good enough for my text notes (with image and PDF attachments).

I transitioned to MacOS 10 years back.. and lo behold, free OneNote application available there too with free cloud storage (OneDrive) and cross device sync story (mobile, Windows). Works great.


No way of avoiding cloud storage though, which is a problem for confidential information. That's why I dropped it when I moved to Mac, and the Windows version later moved to the same restriction. It's a pity: I happily paid for OneNote in the early days, and in some respects I have not found anything as good.

Oh, and one peculiar restriction: I found that there was no way to import the .one files I had brought over from Windows, even though there was at least one third party system which could do it.


> Then, for less than the cost of Evernote, you can get a O365 subscription and get the Office suite and 1TB of storage.

Take the slightly more expensive family pack, and 5 people can use it on 5 devices each. It's one of the too-good-to-be-true deals out there.


Even better, it's 6 people. You plus 5 family members.


I have tried to use oneNote a few times and it just doesn’t not compute to me. Some union of Notability + Paperpile would be perfect. I review proposals, peer review manuscripts, and read papers for my own research, all done with notes take with the handwritten scribble function over a PDF (which Evernote never got right).

I have friends with OneNote and no matter what they explain, it does not make sense to me.


I was on your shoes around 2014 to 2018.

The client I was assigned to, used for everything on project management related documentation.

I couldn't understand how to approach it.

Then around 2019, in another project it suddenly made sense, after several approaches trying to make sense out of it.


I still can't figure out how to use note,I have tried different approach but having to jump different application and rewrite everything 2 or 3 times, just don't compute in my brain.


I don't use OneNote for long standing documentation (maybe one tab is a cheat sheet). I just make a tab for each ongoing work project/client/etc, and paste stuff in there. Text from emails as a todo list which I think write comments to, notes from a zoom call, screenshots of things I need to fix, that sort of thing. I go through and edit or add comments on what needs to be done then just delete it when it's finalised and I can stop thinking about it.

It's basically a cross between a messy desk and todo list. It works well enough for me. I've tried using stuff like Trello and that is a little too much friction for me, the way you can paste text and images together in OneNote and rearrange them visually just works for me. Sometimes it just feels right to have this item "off to the side" or that sort of thing.


Basically how I came around using it, was instead of having txt files, office files and a bunch of screenshots scattered around on the filesystem under the respective project directory, I started organizing such content inside Notes itself.


So you store all your documents within OneNote?


No, only those related to project delivery, that are kind of note taking stuff.

Documentation to be shared across the team is in Confluence or similar wiki platform.

Documents to be shared with the customer are in Office formats.


In systems like that, I often find myself in the frustrating situation of “I know I saw a sentence with <phrase> in it; which of the three systems should I search in? If I don’t find it, is it because the phrase was slightly different, or is there a fourth or fifth system I need to search?”

It’s maddening and is my several times per week experience.


Maybe I have simple needs, but iOS notes does everything I want.

1. Instantly synced between all computers and devices (yes I know I need to be in the Mac/iPhone ecosystem, but I happen to be in that anyway)

2. Create folders

3. Paste images

4. Fonts/bullets etc.

Apparently that's all I need. Anything else is a hindrance.


I love the design of Notes, and I used it a lot for the past few years to store work and personal notes, but I found the sync to be very unreliable. Notes on my iPhone keeps getting out of sync with Notes on my laptop. It happens every few weeks, and I have to log out and login again to fix it. Maddening.

I switched recently to Obsidian and am really enjoying the speed, simplicity, extensibility, and being back in control of my files.


The main reason I love apple notes is it's speed and sync. Just works.

I treed google keep and evernote. Syncing was always overwriting eachother. Starting slow.


Never had that same problem with keep, its almost instantaneous updating for me.


I always have one big note where I add a lot. When using that in both desktop and phone kept overwriting my entries


If they would just improve search it would be really great. There is no way to restrict search to a folder, for example.


Taking notes is a feature, not a product

And given how the "process cyclists" of Notion will move to anything that has more bells and whistles, while the rest of the 99% will use what's available for free and syncs online, it's a hard place to compete

("process cyclists": will pay a lot for every small but hyperoptimized accessory)


You're contradicting yourself. Taking notes is a feature for many, but a product for people whose working style involves taking lots and lots of notes.

Call them "process cyclists" if you want, there is a bimodal distribution for how much people use notes apps, and the people near the high mode are prepared to pay monthly for something good, and tend to be extremely loyal.


> Call them "process cyclists" if you want, there is a bimodal distribution for how much people use notes apps, and the people near the high mode are prepared to pay monthly for something good, and tend to be extremely loyal.

Yes, but Evernote does not fit that category, it fits the 'feature' category


You obviously don't know much about Evernote.


It is a shame Microsoft had basically abandoned OneNote The android app still can't change fonts after 5 years of development. It is pure insanity how little MS cares about their best product They made it brilliant at the start and since then stated they won't update it anymore.


I seriously wish you couldn't change fonts in it. OneNote itself defaults to 11pt Calibri, but the web clipper outputs 12pt Verdana because fuck you. And if you change the font to Verdana, page title font changes from 20pt Calibri Light (IIRC) to like Verdana 20pt which is comically heavy.

Plaintext based notes apps are a blessing in that regard: Since they only store the text, your pages actually look nice and consistent. I have a ton of web clippings in OneNote which are ugly as hell because of font inconsistencies.


I understand that viewpoint and I can see the value in it.

The point I was making is that they done no meaningful improvements on Android since five years. If onenote supports rich text the mobile app should do the same.

I enjoy the rich text since I'm not very organised with my notes, I don't have the patience or discipline to neatly write my thoughts down, I mostly copy paste things and write it in one big OneNote document. I have like 90 different random notes in my 2020 forward dumping note.

I those cases highlighting important info is nice, so I don't have to visually remember where the important things are.

I noticed if I don't allow the chaos I just don't write notes so I prefer this way. I started using todo tasks for things I need to do soon, so babysteps to becoming a compete human ;)


I only wish Microsoft showed it some actual love. The app's been languishing for years, and most any new feature is in the vein of "you can embed TikToks now" or something only applicable to a classroom setting.

That, and while I love that their apps are native, there are serious consistency issues with eg. how search behaves, and the resurrected Windows app still not using the modern sync backend mobile, web and macOS do.


Few years ago I tried to switch to OneNote but it was very sluggish compared to Evernote. I'll give it another go.


true. you even get access and publisher.


I was a paying customer for many years. Despite their continuous attempts to turn it into something I didn't need and eventually didn't want because they wouldn't leave it alone, they didn't manage to run me off until last year. That coincided with the acquisition but I honestly no longer recall if that was the final straw, as they'd been increasingly aggravating me for a while.


I'm still a paying customer.

But I don't trust them and haven't since they made it difficult to export all of your notes. And, they damaged tag-based organization by changing to only list notes that are at the bottom of the tag hierarchy - not those in the middle.

And, they want to be the sole custodian my data, and I don't like a company with that attitude.

Having been involved with system design including large servers for 50 years, I don't trust the cloud. Yeah, the huge cloud providers are staffed by really smart people and it is very unlikely you'll lose your data there (although I sure wouldn't trust Google - they're nuts with their product management).

But a small staff Evernote, under pressure to please investors by somehow adding features that will let them compete in spaces already pretty full - no, I don't trust them to adequately use the cloud to keep my data secure.

I do frequent .enex backups of all my notes.

I haven't switched yet, because it's a pain. But I sure do backups frequently.

And if I see a good alternative (maybe in this thread), I'll jump on it.

As long as I don't have to do the sysadmin all the time (I'd forget - busy with other things, or I'd make some dumb mistake); and as long as it isn't a giant pain to install and build. And as long as it has clients for MacOS (including Apple ARM processors), Android and iOS... then I'll look.

Ideas sought.

The last time I did this search (2020), I didn't find one I liked.


Don't you think having so many competitors offering free notes apps is a large part of it?


He gave the Obsidian example, which is a great one, so no. Obsidian shows you can still do well as a noted app company if you are selling the right thing (sync).


But you can sync your Obsidian notes for free if you use free Dropbox or OneDrive accounts.


This isn't trivial when you start syncing mobile (now you need an extra app, as onedrive doesn't support local), or onto a work device (where I don't want onedrive installed)

There's work arounds (for example I forgot the name, but one plugin allows you to setup onedrive to share just one folder via logging in on each device), but the syncing story wasn't great. Quite a bit of extra setup across all devices, more points of failure etc.

Hence the smart business model, of let us handle it for you for a small cost.


There's an Obisidian plugin for direct syncing to OneDrive that works on both mobile and desktop - this keeps you from having to deal with either triggered syncs through github or the various other, painful syncing processes.

https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save


Remember Evernote had those physical notebooks where you could write in them with real pens and pay the subscription and then take a picture and upload them with OCR? That was the only thing I remember that you couldnt get for free.


I've used https://getrocketbook.com somewhat recently. Supports Evernote and other cloud services too.


> I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did.

But they were doing seeming fine ? It's not some new VC funded corp that failed after 5 years


I don't buy it.

To me, the real story is that Evernote sucked for a long time. They never evolved and what worked in 2008 stopped working a while ago. Notion and Obsidian and iCloud ate their lunch, and all apps these days are so well connected that you could even use Slack for reminders and self messages and get most of the note taking functionality that you would ever need.


Big issue is competition. you're never going to compete in this space as a premium service when users can take their notes and throw them on MS Notes or Google Keep or the 20 other note taking apps. Or simply use any number of cloud solutions and keep them in any variety of text/picture files.

Evernote when I used it a decade ago was great, but not irreplaceable.


I would like to pick your brain about Notion for the reasoning you mentioned. Do you think Notion would be the next Evernote - in both the good and the bad way? Both the services are serving the same segment of the consumer market & both started out with generous offerings for free. I could be wrong how I see it but it would be nice to hear something interesting.


It's hard to say. In a lot of ways, they can address the same market, but from different directions. Evernote is a single-user focused app that extended to collaborative notetaking, Notion is a knowledge base app that can be used by individuals.

The market is different, and Notion has always had a present limitation of how much a free account can get away with, even if it is generous. There's a pretty stark difference in saying "have the whole enchilada for free" at first and then "now we're limiting the devices you can sync to" or "now these other features you had are no longer free", vs. "your usage is always metered, and there is a generous free tier". I do imagine there is some sense in that if the free tier threshold was reduced that would cause some pain, but setting the expectation of "lunch is free, all you can eat" and then pivoting to "lunch is still mostly free but now you have to pay for desert" is going to make anyone mad that they have to pay for dessert now.


No the OP. I think Notion targets SMBs and maybe teams within enterprises.

When they started the personal plan was paid (after first 1k blocks or so), then in 2020 they’ve lifted that restriction[0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236786


Are they really in the same segment?

Evernote's killer feature was its ability to "scan" paper documents with a smartphone and to be able to search on those documents in the future.

Notion is just a Markdown editor.


I cannot stand how difficult it is to create, use, and copy/paste tables. It means I'm forced to stick with OneNote.


> to convert free users to paying users for the same features

Not the same features, worse features. They intentionally abandoned Evernote Classic that was like 3 time faster, not clattered, practically without ads, and with more-more features. I will happily pay Evernote some reasonable price if my experience will be better, not worse..


I agree freemium plans have hazards like that. But as somebody who never converted, it was because Evernote always felt kinda shaky for me. I was willing to pay for great, reliable software. But them asking for money for adequate but buggy software was a hard sell for me.


> and telling you that if you want to own the sync story that you can, but you can pay to have the cohesive experience on every device

What stops you to sync for free using free Dropbox or OneDrive accounts?


It sounds like that I didn't explain myself super well, because we agree. Using Dropbox or OneDrive to do sync is still owning the sync story yourself. You may not be writing the file syncing software, but you're not using Obsidian's purpose built sync system.


I wonder how that 100 year guarantee is holding up?

https://longnow.org/ideas/evernote-and-the-100-year-data-gua...


>Evernote CEO Phil Libin announced at the recent Le Web London conference that the company will soon set up a protected fund and include a legally binding guaratee that users’ data will be maintained for 100 years

That almost sounds like a threat to commit a crime in certain jurisdictions. A lot has changed regarding how we talk about data in the last decade.


> legally binding guaratee that users’ data will be maintained for 100 years That almost sounds like a threat to commit a crime in certain jurisdictions.

It’s (or was) the promise for you to be able to access your data for so long, provided you agree. Not hoarding private data against your will.


Seems like a lot of these replies are skipping over the “almost” in my comment. I was not being literal. I was pointing out that they simply assumed that all users would want this. There was no “provided you agree” disclaimer in their comments. If anything, the specifics of it being 100 years actually implies that consent isn’t even a consideration since we can assume that nearly all Evernote users will be dead in 100 years. It is a strange reminder that so few people were concerned about this sort of thing in 2012.


Better start burning down the libraries too then? Preserving customer data with their explicit consent isn't related to data retention rules in privacy laws.


That announcement was in 2012.[1] Did they do it? I can't find any indication that they actually implemented it. Which was a good reason to get off Evernote a decade ago.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2012/06/21/tech/web/internet-data-everno...


GDPR was not designed to target service providers providing a data service storing and processing data that the customer explicitly contracted for. That would be under data processing which has different rules.

Unless the guarantee was for Evernote to hold this data for 100 years irrespective of what the customer wishes and for example after the customer has ended their contract for the service, this angle doesn't apply.


Many companies are purging data associated with inactive accounts as part of data minimization. If the user specifically asked for indefinite retention before going inactive, that might be one thing, but as a general practice it could be risky.


In legal terms Evernote is not "data controller" but "data processor". They are not responsible for ensuring conformity with retention rules.


A data processor has no say in how and for how long is the data stored. They implement exactly hat the data controller said, not more, not less. So in this case guaranteeing 100 years is just nonsense. But... in our case it's Evernote itself who gathered all its own data from its own users according to its own rules, so I really struggle to understand why you won't see them as data controllers.


As far as GDPR is concerned, I think they are a controller if they are processing data to provide their service they run to customers. The control how that service works, and are not processing data on behalf of a controller explicitly under their written instructions. If they were a service used by a company like this, they would be a processor. The rertention period here is presumably until the user closes their account or deletes the data from it, possibly plus some period to allow for Evernote to delete it, and the basis is performance of the contract created by their terms of service, or consent. If so, they don't have to delete it until they are instructed to bny the user. They would have to probvide for a way gfor it to be deleted by the organisation they setup to retain it when setting that up though. That organisation would be a processor, unless an explicit relationship with the customer was created with them (which I would expect there would be as part of the user accepting using it), in which case I think it would also be a controller. Either way, they would be responsible for deleting the data when the customer wants it deleted because either they would be as a result of their relationship with the cuastomer if they were a controller, or because it would (have to be) be part of the terms of the processoring agreement with Evernote.


Is it a threat to commit a crime if it was posted before the law existed?


Exactly. Retrospective laws like that would face stiff opposition.


Ex post facto laws should be prohibited in any civilized country.


Holding data is on ongoing behavior. It isn't an ex post facto law to change how a company handles it in the future. Coca-Cola can't sell you a soda with cocaine in it just because it was legal when they started their business.

What would make it an ex post facto law is if companies were punished for how they handled data before the law was created. It is perfectly reasonable to punish them if they continue that same behavior after the law was created.


True. But for Coke, at least, I wish they'd "grandfathered" it in!


I think it would greatly complicate things if cold-storage backups count as holding data.

Some poor kid would have to go and load all the tapes and redact it.


An excellent comment.


Every privacy policy and terms of service document is an ex post facto "law" if it was changed even once.


Public laws and private contracts are two different things.

For one, you can typically opt out of the latter, but not the former.


Copying my comment from a couple of days ago as that is simply not practically true:

>All my university systems run on Microsoft. All my future employers' systems will probably run on Microsoft. All public transport in my country effectively requires an app which is tied to either Google or Apple operating systems to buy tickets. Schools require students as young as 6 years old to have an iPad or chromebook tied to Google or Apple.

>There is no real choice in our modern society to "not give your personal data" to these megacorps.

You'd have to be homeless, unemployed, unbanked and practically a hermit to even approach "opting out" from this private law. That's not a real choice.


The solution is to have goverments use Linux which many do, use libre office suites, sponsor projects that government project's outsourcing companies use. Web interfaces for all services without needing to signup for a third party EULA.


Sadly though, that still doesn't resolve other problems.

How many people have gmail addresses? Use Google products, such as Google's VOIP service? How many cars, or home(now) come with such products built in?

I guess what I'm getting at is, even if you do your best to purge yourself, and even if you try to purge the government, you're still left dealing with people, and if you email them at gmail, then Google still gets the entire conversation.

And if we somehow manage to create at "Don't store this" situation, will it be like when the Canadian government passed a law, forcing Google, Facebook, etc to pay for linking to stories? Just as Australia did?

They're effectively dropped all Canadian news sources.

So, would they "drop" users who have requested no data storage? That is, you cannot email anyone at gmail? It goes into a dead hole?

I suspect that freemium, as a business model, is going to be completely incompatible with democracy.


Google just recently updated their ToS for purging accounts that aren't active thereby dropping accounts which were part of free tier.


Yeah, it's typically easier to emigrate out of the reach of your law's country than to avoid the reach of these trillion-dollar-worth corporations.


Or with enough laws, every law can be applied selectively


WWCD


Crime against humanity didn't even exist as a concept (let alone a law) before Nuremberg, do you think the condamnation of the nazis there as “uncivilized”?


The retroactive criminalisation at Nuremberg absolutely was controversial at the time. It only got pushed through because of US instance. It is literally an example of might making right.


Seems like an extreme counter example. In the spirit of the parent post I guess you could argue theft, murder etc. was already illegal?

Also, it is morally different when you want to punish lawmakers.


> Seems like an extreme counter example.

It is voluntarily ridiculously extreme, because the parent comment was itself ridiculously categorical.

The thing is: most of the time, retro-active laws are dangerous tools that should be used rarely and with caution, but sometimes and when some people have been doing something that they knew was evil even though not technically illegal, it can make sense to punish them with laws designed after the fact.


Sure fair enough. That is the problem with many rules of thumb, where people interpret "all" and "always" to mean all and always.

Especially evident in programming. E.g. "premature optimization is the root of all evil".


That’s one line everyone remembers snipped from somewhat more nuanced context.

Knuth said: "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."


Oh ... ye well Knuth makes my point. :)


No, it’s not a threat to commit a crime (grandparent wrote “almost”).

Still, the problem remains; i.e. a new law is likely to require you to remove some content that you’ve been serving or to change the way you’re handling the content.


> legally binding guaratee that users’data will be maintained for 100 years

This sounds mostly like a PR stunt to use the word "legally" to try to instill a false sense of confidence in users when in reality, "legally" doesn't mean much. Legally binding to what? The corporation? The corporation can run out of funds and die in 2 years, and then the contract isn't bound to anything.

Legally binding for 100 years has NOTHING to do with staying alive for 100 years.


So much shit here against GDPR which is basically:

1. if you want your data removed, companies HAVE to remove your data

2. if you don't want your data stored, companies CANNOT store your data

and then a bunch of if-when-then-else-must-cannot-time-dependent-legal-stuff


You conveniently forgot to define what really is "your data".


If you send an email from gmail to me, you don't get to ask that it be deleted just because you decide to delete your own gmail account. (Well you can ask but it would be unreasonable to comply. Same, if arguably less strongly, for comments you've made on posts or in threads on social media.)


only companies are subject to GDPR


The devil's in the details.


I wonder if this eroding trust with startups and companies will become a real problem for them. I mean by now things like "lifetime subscription" have little meaning coming a commercial entity.

Well, I'm off enjoying the last few weeks of my lifetime HBO cheap subscription.


I’ve been delighted with my “lifetime” Plex pass, but I worry the day will soon come when I discover the end of the lifetime.

Marco Arment has occasionally complained about lifetime, one-time Overcast premium subscriptions and how he’d really like to rug pull those. But, to his credit, has no present plans to do so. However, it’s more because he doesn’t want to deal with the backlash, rather than because the right thing to do is honor “lifetime.”


> However, it’s more because he doesn’t want to deal with the backlash, rather than because the right thing to do is honor “lifetime.”

Yeah, it's that. He mentioned once that Apple had a rule where you can't remove functionality bought through in-app purchases, probably around the same time he was lamenting one-time subscriptions. He definitely would pull the rug (to use the phrase) if he could, and I wonder if he limits adding features to Overcast because of it.


I’m reminded of a quote from Tommy Boy about guarantees.

> Ted Nelson, Customer : But why do they put a guarantee on the box?

>Tommy : Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product from me


Tommy Boy quotes? A true scholar of the old school.


> a legally binding guaratee that users’ data will be maintained for 100 years, even if the company itself is bought or ceases to be.

If you ain’t got the cash, your words don’t matter


I see that the article says "will", but CEOs and their companies will square the circle every time they are drumming up publicity and impressing potential investors. If they have squared the circle it would be such a feat that there will be a press release talking about it in the past tense, not the progressive or the future.


>I wonder how that 100 year guarantee is holding up?

I wonder when did such a bold guarantee work in practice?


In case if you want some Evernote alternatives, here's my shortlist:

1. Trilium Notes: https://github.com/zadam/trilium

2. AppFlowy: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy

3. Affine: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE

4. Joplin: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin

5. Dendron: https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron (requires VSCode)

As a programmer I liked Dendron the most but if you want it to be packed with absolute features, try Trilium Notes (but some considered it to be feature creep and bloated)


I'm biased but I'd add--

- Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/

- Logseq: https://logseq.com/

- Reflect: https://reflect.app/

- Stashpad: https://stashpad.com/


I'm wondering what happy mediums might exist between the note-taking world, the wiki world, and the collaborative office document world.

Office-oriented tools like Nextcloud or Collabora seem to be oriented to classic Microsoft Word / Google Docs style documents... not as simple as Markdown or as web-friendly as a wiki page.

The note taking tools everyone's talking about don't seem to support collaborative editing. If they're file-based without a server, then you either have to lock the file for editing, or you have to always remember to sync first to avoid conflicts. Syncthing can't really handle that scenario very well.

Also, wikis usually aren't file-based... they require a database. Plus they don't seem to be as lovingly designed as the note-taking tools... they seem to have a very retro MediaWiki style.

Does anyone know of a self-hosted solution that checks all those boxes? File-based (perhaps aided by database driven indexing) with real collaborative editing, more web-oriented than Word-oriented?


Disclaimer, I'm on AFFiNE's team.

But I really think you can check us out as I think we can cover those boxes for you.

We offer real-time collaborative editing which also works offline. We deal with all those conflict issues for you.

And though we aren't file-based, we do offer various export options such as MD, HTML, PDF and images.

We expect to have the latest Docker version and real-time collaboration available towards the end of this month. In the mean time I'd invite you to try the client to see how it feels.


Are there plans to make it e2ee?


I've been using Logseq for a few months and am loving it. Its model is pretty different from Evernote, and in ways I think are superior. The heart of is the daily journal, and you can tag each lump (which they call a block) with hashtags. You can also create pages, of course, but I find myself doing that less and less.


Yeah, Logseq really works with my mind. I create pages, but as anchors to refer to various people or concepts. Every block is created inside the daily note. It took me a while to stop overthinking it and just use the daily note.

Logseq's killer feature, though, is the Anki plugin: https://github.com/debanjandhar12/logseq-anki-sync

... it's so easy to create and revise cards using this plugin, which is really important, as I almost never get a card's shape right for committing something to memory on the first try.

A couple caveats I'd mention:

* Logseq's sync system was really buggy for me during the time I used it. I stopped using it for a while, as the sync was the only way I could get E2E encryption and still have mobile access. With iOS advanced data security, I feel like iCloud sync gets me most of the way there. * They really need to invest in the editor experience. If I had something like a Bear or Typora experience within Logseq, I think I'd have my perfect tool.


I like and use joplin. Waiting for it to sync sucks (even though it's pretty quick) but I like that you can edit in vim on the desktop and a dedicated app on mobile.

I use it for recipes, where it's easiest to write them on a laptop but better to read them on a phone/tablet.


Unfortunately Trilium, the closest option to Evernote (as opposed to Notion), doesn't have an Android client (there is one to send notes but not search/read).

Looks like Joplin is the one checking all the right boxes (added plus of being able to sync via OneDrive, which is free, and with E2E I don't care which cloud it sits on)


I've been using StandardNotes for years and been happy with them. Is there a reason I should look elsewhere at these or other alternatives? It's just interested I am not seeing this product mentioned anywhere here!


They do some things really well. I like the speed and effectiveness of the sync across various devices and OSs, like a personal pastebin.

I have a subscription, and was hoping that they'd converge towards something like a wiki, where the notes can link to each other. The suggestion seemed to be rejected out of hand, maybe it's just not their vision. It is mine, though, so I have migrated to Joplin, and expect to let the subscription expire at this point.


I am also surprised at how rarely Standard Notes is mentioned.


I really like it ... the ios app is great, it syncs super fast, I love how easy it is to switch between plain text, markdown, todo list, etc... It's perfect for my workflow, I just find it odd that nobody else was mentioning it.

So here I am doing so! If you don't use it, check it out.


It looks really, really interesting. But when you say it syncs super fast... is syncing initiated manually, or do you mean that changes on one device appear on another device quickly?


the latter. I can make note changes on my phone and a few seconds later sit down at my desktop and everything is updated.


Dendron is no longer developed, and in any case is intended for a very different use case than Evernote.

Amplenote might be a better drop-in replacement.


Amplenote looks really promising.


Do any permit a transfer-in from Evernote?


Joplin does, and it works rather well. I have been planning on migrating my notes since the acquisition, but wanted to see what their next move was.

Joplin seems like the best at handling my mix of text notes, PDF files, and images at the moment. If it doesn't work out, though, at least I have my data in a more open form.


Standard Notes claims to, with a caveat that there may be a format it can't handle due to Evernote adding features.

A transfer-in from Evernote, either natively or through some third party utility, is a must. I'm not interested in writing something to parse .enex and put it into some other format (although .enex looks pretty easy to parse - it's xml with embedded BASE64 for some things like images).


Joplin does


Thanks. As an Evernote user since 2007, and paying customer for several years, this sucks.

I’m curious: why is Notion not on your short list?


Which one is the most future proof? I recently tried Organice, even though it has a different feature set, because is is basically future proof even if the hosting company tops functioning


Obsidian is a bunch of markdown files.


Google Keep for people who just want a Notepad that syncs


Am I the only one who just keeps a bunch of Sublime Text tabs open? Obsidian looks pretty good for the tagging functionality though


Do any of these replicate evernote's web clipping feature? That was definitely the killer app for me.


You might like the browser plug in SingleFile to save and markup pages. I've incorporated it into my obsidian vault workflow.


Can any of these record voice notes?


My Evernote use peaked in 2013-2014, during a whirlwind postdoctoral fellowship. Man, I loved that thing. So simple and responsive. It was a real tool of thought, and I used it for everything. From then on, it got worse and worse every time I "upgraded", and I basically stopped using it since 2016 or so.

Yesterday I "upgraded" at its urging, against my better judgment, and was greeted with a lovely surprise: no local notes anymore. Only cloud sync. The justification for this was basically "less capability is actually good for users", phrased in more or less that way. It seemed like the developers were blinking torture at me.

Evernote was a big blackpill. My bitterest realization that technology doesn't necessarily progress, and many products are just trapped in a cycle of tragedy.


You took the words out of my mouth. Exactly my experience, except I deleted my account in 2020. Evernote taught me to stop trusting startups with critical services, to manage my own notes, and to always have an exit strategy.


I like to bring up my personal opinion and realization of owning an open format -- plain-text - content for your life-long textual contents.

I was once an Evernote user since its early days and a premium subscriber for many years. I have used many notetaking apps and bought enough of them – iA Writer, ByWord, Bear, SimpleNote, nvAlt fork of Notational Velocity, etc.

I have moved to a simpler notetaking and writing habit for my notes. I have chosen a simple plain-text life. The idea is to approach contents as data-first with tools on the top. I have grown to like the simple methods I use and the philosophies of managing the files and the directories/folders.

I wrote about it sometime back - https://brajeshwar.com/2022/plain-text/


Have you tried Obsidian?

3 days ago one of the obsidian makers posted this: https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1675626836821409792

Key quote:

"These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last."

Seems to align with your philosophy


Obsidian's problem is Sync + Publish costs way too much, esp. when compared with competitors.

Notesnook provides almost everything Evernote provides, with encryption, better publishing and syncing.

Notion provides more features, incl. publishing and syncing plus the kitchen sink and its factory, yet it doesn't have offline access.

For sync + publish, I have to pay 1.5x what Dropbox wants for 2TB of storage, or what Trello wants for a year, etc.

It makes no sense, at least for me.

BTW, Evernote's .enex format is just well-defined XML. You can parse and convert it into anything you want. It's a modest superset of Markdown.


>Obsidian's problem is Sync + Publish costs way too much, esp. when compared with competitors.

You can sync for free using Syncthing or OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox free accounts.


Thanks! Does that work with the mobile app, too?


Yes, it does.


On ios you can only do icloud though


It blows my mind that Apple can tell you how you're allowed to copy your plain text files from one of your computers to another one of your computers. If you look at the behavior sans the branding, it would not be hard to label it malware.


not sure we have the same definition of 'malware'. the problem isn't copying/syncing the file from one computer to another, that works just fine. but obsidian can't read outside its own app folder IIRC.

i sync files with dropbox to my ios devices all the time.


I define "malware" to mean software that intentionally subverts the desires of the owner of the computer (unintentional subversion is a bug or a miscommunication).

Apple arbitrarily restricts you from using your applications (obsidian) to read and write your data in a way that you can sync, to no fault of its own, your own, or the syncing service.

I strongly encourage you to try associating this kind of behavior with an unfamiliar organization as a mental exercise. How would you feel about that? Someone else restricting your access to your computer such that you cannot use your applications how you want, through no technical fault of their own? I bet that would see that as a problem you would want to fix right away.


Apple is upfront about it and I knew what I was getting (and not getting). To be honest, i can barely ever use any of my software the way i want it.

Obsidian's sync service for example has dark patterns and is a lot closer to your definition of malware as they are hiding how their sync works (versioning, bugs they know but don't advertise, merge conflicts that destroys data etc).

> I bet that would see that as a problem you would want to fix right away.

No. But I also don't know what "fix" means in this context? Not use Obsidian? As using Android is not an option.


Apple may be upfront, but a couple of years ago they pretty much suddenly destroyed Progressive Web Apps by disallowing a whole bunch of modern, open standard browser capabilities, all in the name of preventing tracking.

A lot of developers were just crushed by that. Imagine having hundreds of thousands of dollars into developing an app when Apple just destroys the ability to do it.

When a big corporation has monopoly power (and Apple is very close to that - only one equally evil competitor in mobile space), they do bad things, often thinking they are doing good.

[caveat - there is so far an unofficial way to get around their "we will blow away your saved browser data" that was discussed by one of the webkit developers on the webkit blog. But since it isn't an official Apple doc - do we trust it?]

I was one developer who was burned. I was developing, as a volunteer, a web app for a very large volunteer organization. Boom... now it may not be possible, or if I use the work-around, it may be possible until it suddenly changes.


You seem to be ignoring the whole voluntary aspect of using Apple devices. Are you being forced to using iOS at gun point? Up vote once for yes, twice for no.


It’s not like it’s a dark pattern, hidden under multiple layers of disinformation and redirection. Apps have always been siloed on iOS and it has even got better as some apps can break out of the container model (PDF Viewer is a prime example). I bought an iPhone and an iPad knowing that. If it ever bugs me, I switch to Android (which, BTW, is moving to the container model). Which means Obsidian could have requested permissions for the folder to be placed somewhere else (Textastic can access random folders on the filesystem).

Even though my phone and my tablet is capable of being a general purpose device, it was not the reason I bought them. They have a specific purpose and they are filling it well. I wouldn’t buy a microwave and complain I can’t make cakes with it.


There's a plugin that resolves this (https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save) and you can also use pre-launch shortcuts using WorkingCopy if you want to sync via git.


I tried using iCloud to sync for a year and went back to Obsidian Sync. I’m not sure exactly what the culprit was, but frequently, I would find my ToDo note (which was used the most) would be stuck and fail to sync for days. Rebooting the stick machine would clear the issue. I was using two Macs and my iPhone at the time.


For me it's fixed by rebooting my mac actually. Had that yesterday for the first time. You can check who's not syncing by checking the "Files" app.


because it uses icloud drive. and that syncs poorly and on its own schedule. it would sometimes take a day or so to get a file from my mac studio to my macbook. it is crazy how bad icloud is.


my wife and I share stuff within icloud and we both HATE IT SO MUCH. It's truly mind boggling how bad it is, and continues to be, in 2023. Photos sometimes sync, sometimes they don't. Cool. Sometimes rebooting the phone makes them sync, other times not. Awesome. Sometimes shared notes get updated, other times they don't. Sometimes shared note invitations just never arrive at all, for no discernible reason. Sweet. It took us 4 attempts to do a shared Home app invitation. The first 3 times it just never showed up.

We HATE HATE HATE icloud so much but our only other option is to switch everything to Android and I hate Google more than I hate Apple, so ....... we just stick with icloud and its absolute shittiness.


Switch to Microsoft? OneNote's entire file format is built to enable live collaboration. Their apps may be a bit clunky but they work.


> Notesnook provides almost everything Evernote provides, with encryption, better publishing and syncing.

In the two years I've used Notesnook, my biggest issue is the slow syncing between devices: A change I make on the mobile app takes minutes to update on the desktop app, whereas a similar change on the Obsidian mobile app is nearly instantaneous. Additionally, Notesnook doesn't allow external editors, like vim or emacs, to edit files. Sure, you can extort files to Markdown, but those do not get synced anywhere. Obsidian gives a user the flexibility by editing files directly without the app.


I tried obsidian but didn’t feel it was much better than opening a folder in VSCode, and as I am already used to VSCode, that is easier for me.


The tagging features and the ability to just paste a picture in a markdown file are the things that bring me back to Obsidian instead of VSCode


Same. Have you tried https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ ? It does some of the things Obsidian does, but is a VS Code Plugin. I really like that combination.


Have you tried https://www.dendron.so/ ? I think that was aiming to be a knowledgebase in vscode


I replied to him with with my idea and article https://twitter.com/brajeshwar/status/1675905574624702465

From the article, “Right now, I use Obsidian to manage my notes. The beauty of this setup is that I can change tools anytime, while my notes remain free of any dependency.”


Since when twitter allows posting 2172 character long message? Apparently char limit is now 25k for subscribers...


I am having a better experience using plain text over a mosh connection than using apps that sync files over the network.

The logic is that if I have internet connection available to sync, then I can also connect to my computer and use a tmux session with vim to edit my plain text notes. If I use the same tmux session in all devices, then the notes are always in sync.


I’ve been using the same OneNote notebook for 20 years. It automatically syncs across all my mobile devices, the web and desktop. It supports all kinds of rich text and images.

It’s way simpler than setting up manual backup and syncing of a tons of text file.


Write-up of a similar system. http://songseed.org/post/20120101.aa.saga.html


Sticking to plain text is like living in a cave - possible, but unpleasant. Why would you remove all the formatting and integration niceties of modern tech?

> Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text.

So what? Every relevant device can also read and write a bunch of more useful formats


I absolutely love plain text notes. Maybe you could understand that just because you think something is unpleasant and ancient, the rest of the entire human race might not agree? Shocking I know.

I can't stand any formatting whatsoever on my notes. I love plain text because it stays exactly as that: plain text. I don't want my dashes to be turned into spacers, I don't want my asterisks to be turned into lists, etc...


TBC, those examples are from markdown, which is orthogonal to the plain <> styled text axis.


Not as shocking as you trying to speak for the whole human race, which evolved past no formatting while still living in the caves


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