Evernote Now Charges Some Users $250 a Year. Canceling Won't Erase Notes

Evernote Free keeps old notes but blocks new ones past 50 notes or one notebook, the company's help pages say.

The average Evernote customer had been with the note-taking app for 7.2 years when Bending Spoons bought it, and the new owner says that staying power was part of the appeal.

Bending Spoons said so in a June filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which Ars Technica went through to explain why old apps get expensive. The filing praises a "highly engaged and tenured customer base" and notes that many customers kept thousands of notes in Evernote. Then there's the bill: this year, Ars reported, some subscribers went from $130 a year to $250.

The filing reads less like an apology than a lab report. Bending Spoons says it ran more than 200 experiments from 2023 through 2025, price tests among them, and added usage limits to features it opened up to free users. By the company's own count, hitting one of those limits accounted for 51 percent of Evernote's paid conversions in 2025.

Evernote has company. Ars found that individual plans for Quicken, Robokiller and the Markdown notes app Inkdrop have each doubled. Plex's lifetime pass cost $75 in 2012, Ars noted. On May 19, Plex announced the pass would go from $249.99 to $749.99 on July 1, 9to5Mac reported.

For anyone deciding whether to pay up or get out, here's what the companies' own pages say.

1. Canceling Evernote doesn't delete anything. Evernote's help page, last updated Aug. 21, 2025, says notes and notebooks stay put after a downgrade to Free. Users can still open, edit, export and delete them.
2. Free is a small room, though. Evernote's plans page caps Free at 50 notes, one notebook and one device. The help page says an account over 50 notes or one notebook can't create new notes, and that's an overall cap, not a monthly one. It's the same kind of wall Bending Spoons credits for half its conversions.
3. Check the middle tier. The plans page lists Starter between Free and Advanced, with room for 1,000 notes, 20 notebooks and three devices. Plans are switched under Manage Subscription in Evernote Web's account settings.
4. Cancel where the money goes. Evernote's FAQ says subscriptions bought through Apple or Google Play have to be managed there. Paid time runs to the end of the billing cycle, then the account drops to Free on its own, the help page says.
5. Students get a break. Eligible college students get 40 percent off a year of Evernote Advanced, the plans page says.
6. Plex users may need less than Plex Pass. Plex's plans page says streaming on a home network is free. Its Remote Watch Pass covers only remote streaming and lists at $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year since introductory pricing ended June 1. Plex said lifetime holders wouldn't be touched by the hike, and monthly and yearly Plex Pass pricing stayed at $6.99 and $69.99, according to 9to5Mac.
7. Don't count on being grandfathered. Plex spared its lifetime holders. Inkdrop spared nobody. Developer Takuya Matsuyama wrote that he moved every existing subscription from $4.90 a month to $9.98 through the payment processor Stripe. He announced the change Jan. 22, 2024, and it took effect Feb. 5, about two weeks later.

Matsuyama didn't hide who he was building for. He'd prefer "a few thousand customers who really like my app rather than >10k broader customers," he wrote in the announcement Ars quoted. His churn rate jumped from about 4 percent to 9 percent after the news, he wrote, then settled near 3 percent within nine months. The people who stayed paid double.

Source: arstechnica.com, retrieved October 27, 2026. Other sources: 9to5mac.com, help.evernote.com, evernote.com, plex.tv, devas.life.