Most of the decisions made regarding product features were user-hostile not just to the free tier, but also to paying users who did not want the "features" they kept pushing out.
You mean greed.
- Increase prices - which will drive some of your customers away.
- Revenue through ads - which will drive some of your customers away.
- New products - risky, and if successful it sometimes means the original product becomes abandonware.
- New features to try to increase the audience for your product or monetize directly - what it seems like Evernote did.
But not every product can have billions or even millions of users. So sometimes these all fail anyway. Basically investment, whether from VCs or an IPO, is often death for a small business serving a niche market.
The problem is that the PMs are incentivized to deliver features, even if that is not the right thing to do.
See: Postman.
If a PM is just delivering features without tying it back to user needs, business growth & product strategy then they are just a "feature factory" which is bad product management.
I was a paid user of the lower tier, and I decided to leave when they kept showing me nag screens to push me to buy the higher tiers. Totally unacceptable in a product I was paying for.
I disagree.
I have came back to paid plan last year and Evernote works really well on Mac (except slow startup, but that has also improved over last year), quite well on ChromeOS (in browser)... Evernote web capture extension is superior to everything else I have tried especially behind paywalls.
Evernote works so well, and it is quite polished and stable. So much that it had became base for my daily workflow which is mostly journaling with lots of attachments..