Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

1,025 pointsbaron816614 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.

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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 wonder how that 100 year guarantee is holding up?

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

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)

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.

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/

For the last 5 days I have been actively trying to cancel my Evernote personal plan. The site would break every time I navigated to manage my subscription or try and reach support.

I guess that's one way to reduce customer churn.

The new features will be feeding everyone's notes into an LLM and then screaming "AI!" at the top of their lungs to investors.

Obsidian.md for the win. I used to use evernote way back when they started, was cool software, then they started scaling and added worst search UI I have ever come across. That day, I deleted my account and went markdown with my own storage. Don't see the benefit of why your notes should be controlled by others.

This REALLY SUCKS. I’ve been using Evernote as a catch-all app for a bit now: scanning documents for paperless, archiving website snapshots, notes for various things (I love being able to make a note tied to a calendar event!), the super good OCR capabilities, task management (even if buggy…), etc. It does a lot for me, and it has great capabilities for bringing information/content into it. There is literally nothing else out there that has the unique set of capabilities I actively use in the same package. (And no, Joplin is not “just as good”) Unbundling to multiple places that don’t have the same capabilities (not to mention not having their supposed upcoming AI search I was really looking forward to) is going to be an absolute downgrade for me and make it harder to manage my life.

If someone knows of something that can fill the void of Evernote so I don’t have to like, use Apple Notes with Reminders (which while you can access them on Windows via the browser, it’s a mediocre experience at best) and like raindrop.io for website archival all at the same time.

And I’m not moving to OneNote which while it might have most of that stuff, I hate using it.

Boss1: let's create a great note taking app

Employee1: creates a great note taking app

Customers: :) :) :)

Boss2: let's milk more money, does anyone have a good idea?

Bean Counter: let's add some useless crap, our customer base will quadruple

Employee1: ads useless crap

Customers: ? ? ?

Boss3: let's milk more money, does anyone have a good idea?

Bean Counter: let's fire Employee1, hire Employee2 for half the wage and rewrite everything in Electron

Employee2: rewrites everything in Electron

Customers: :( :( :(

For those looking for a focused alternative to Evernote, check out minimal.app – I built Minimal as the antithesis of Evernote: instead of clutter and feature bloat, Minimal offers focus and simplicity. I love Minimal and use it every day, simply because it is the most focused notes app I could find.

Minimal's most innovative feature is the Note Lifetime, whereby notes "die" when they go unedited for so many days. (The Note Lifetime is customizable, and notes remain available in a deleted notes folder.) The effect is an always-clean collection of notes that truly reflects the present moment. Another effect is more action on the persistent, good ideas and less action/procrastination on the ideas that might be best let go of.

Anyone interested in helping me improve the app, craft the roadmap, or simply get premium features for free can join the beta at minimal.app/#beta.

Personal journey: I used to be a heavy user of Evernote, but encountered a bug that the developers were not keen on fixing promptly. It was then that I realized the importance of personal notes surviving beyond companies, apps, and formats. Quickly after, I switched to a collection of plain text files using org-mode markdown and have been happy ever since.

And to think that at one point Evernote was THE note taking app. So much wasted potential.

My use of Evernote has been replaced with two apps a few years ago when they abandoned native apps:

1. https://obsidian.md/ for all the notes.

2. https://archivebox.io/ for almost all webpage clippings.

There's lots of discussion here about the pros and cons of Evernote, and a slew of alternatives, but this HN post is the only result online since February (when there was lots of news about a Bending Spoons/Evernote layoff), what's the source for this July update?

Here is an (incomplete) list[1] of random note-taking apps that you can try if you are leaving Evernotes.

Or you can try ours, which is based on Markdown (not open source) and a nested notecard format (not documents). Heavy emphasis on getting out of your way and just letting you write notes, though still with plenty of power if you need it. It has plenty of other cool features[2] and we're prepping for a pretty big 3.0 release in the very near future which should be exciting.

Yes, this is a very shameless plug. But in the spirit of Threads capitalizing on the upheaval at Twitter, I suppose I can do the same for Evernote.

[1] https://supernotes.app/alternatives/

[2] https://supernotes.app/features/

For anyone that used Evernote as a "Document Storage" app instead of just purely notes, I found Notebooks, https://www.notebooksapp.com/, https://www.notebooksapp.com/ to be a good replacement.

It works with files on your harddrive and your existing cloud storage (icloud / dropbox.) macOS/iOS only, but for someone who primarily is storing PDFs this was a much better fit than more alternates that are for taking notes.

I really hope that this endless wave of layoffs ends soon. I've been let go twice in the last year. Every tech place is going through layoffs and is pausing hiring.

I wrote a browser plugin to automatically fill out a lot of the job application forms, so that I can apply to more jobs in a day, and I get maybe one interview for every three hundred applications. I watch endless tutorials on YouTube about the best way to interview, I spend hours doing problems on Hackerrank or Project Euler, just to be told that they were "impressed by my abilities but they don't think I would be a good fit at this time, but they'll keep my resume on file".

The part that's even worse than rejection for me is idiotic and disingenuous email that I am expected to send to the hiring manager explaining that while it's disappointing that I didn't get the job, but it was such an honor to grovel and waste hours of my life to just be considered for such a prestigious position.

Actually, no, the worst part is the fact that I have to pretend to believe all these companies about their stupid mission statement, and how they're going to save the world. I can't be honest and say "I want a job because I want money in my bank account, and I'm hoping that if I perform labor for you that you will provide me that money", instead I have to make up some reason about how I think StylishlyMispelledCo is actually going to solve all the world's problems and that I want to be a part of the ground floor because I believe in <cause x>, and all the other companies working on <adjacent cause y> simply don't get it. Or I have to pretend that instead of hanging out with my wife or friends, I really want to hang out at a workplace that's more than just a workplace, but also a family.

I'm being unfair to startups, every company is doing this shit now. You can't just do a task because you want a paycheck, you have to launder it through some bullshit sanctimony about saving the world. That's how it was at Apple and Walmart at least.

It's demoralizing, but even worse, it's exhausting. I'm so frustrated with the world right now, and while I know that it certainly will get better eventually, I am also deeply unhappy with my life right now.

I hate the power imbalance that companies hold. I hate that these companies won't acknowledge that power imbalance, or the fact that deep down they're just greedy. I hate that I have to pay for my own healthcare out of pocket (or effectively out of pocket because the COBRA stuff I have is basically worthless). I hate that I got myself into this situation.

They lost the plot when they suddenly reduced the number of devices for the free tier.

There was a time when iCloud wasn't reliable. When that improved, Notes became a simpler free alternative.

I invested $25,000 into buying secondary equity shares of Evernote about 1.5 years ago. In January, I got an exit check back for $120 bucks after the sale to Bending Spoon :/

Even though Evernote is a competitor, it's still sad to see such a giant in the note-taking space go down so badly. Of course, I am still skeptical about this news and whether its actually true since no source has been linked.

Aside:

I work (and lead the development) on Notesnook, an end-to-end encrypted, open source alternative to Evernote. Since we are based in Pakistan, our pricing has been really competitive at just $4.49/mo (compared to $17.99/mo of Evernote). And best of all, we have one of the best Evernote Importers around: https://importer.notesnook.com/

If you'd like to learn more about Notesnook: https://notesnook.com/

Feel free to ask me any and all questions!

I use Obsidian for note-taking, but Evernote for my "digital shoebox" of receipts, PDFs, photos of wine labels, insurance statements, etc. They are all quickly findable through a combination of OCR and tags.

Does anyone have a good alternative for this use-case?

It is perhaps worth noting that spoon bending is a scam from the 1970s.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending

I moved to Standard Notes a while ago. I like free things for basic things like notes, but was happy to pay for E2E Encryption to support what they were up to. I think I got a 5 year licence for $150 which was not outrageous. I just looked up their current prices - $80 a year which means I'll migrate back to Joplin soon.

> How they intend to do that without any staff

Contractors from cheaper cost of living countries, I expect.

Not that I doubt this, because it seemed inevitable to my outsider eyes, but do you have any proof of that?

I’d recommend getting off of Evernote anyway due to trends. However, is there evidence that this is newly urgent?

Honestly new features is something I would go away from, not pay for.

Apps these days treat my device as something created so that they could update on it, not so I could use it. I would pay to "freeze the 2009 versions on my devices forever". Software that just works.

> How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about.

Bending Spoons has a product and engineering team. They may have concluded that they don’t need the staff from Evernote to take the product to the next level.

For the poor few still using Evernote, there are many great alternatives now available:

Notion is the obvious one: https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-not...

Amplenote was heavily inspired by early Evernote: https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-amp...

Reflect is another up and comer: https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-ref...

And of course Obsidian has its many evangelists, though the sharing situation with Obsidian leaves something to be desired.

So many of these comments echo my sentiment around Evernote. I used it for years and was a huge fan, until they reduced functionality and increased prices. I got a new device, couldn't sync my devices, and realized there were many great alternatives. Exported to Joplin and haven't looked back.

This was my impetus to finally close my account and delete my data.

I was holding on to it because Notion's import sucks and would only import a few notes at a time, so I had to do a lot of different imports to get all the notes in all the notebooks, and I wouldn't be surprised if I still missed a few. (I have lots of notes — virtually everything I wanted to remember and keep forever, I put in Evernote.)

I'm a bit sad because Notion is a fundamentally different product and sucks on mobile. It has all the features I'm used to from Evernote, and notes with attached images imported well. I had a lot of notes with a scanned document attached and a brief explanation of what the document was, so that was vital for me.

RIP Evernote. It was an amazing tool, and it served me well for over a decade.

Not sure about the veracity of this, but it is in-line with how people said Bending Spoons operates at the time of the takeover: they buy up apps and then raise prices to try to squeeze more cash out of the existing subscriber base while also cutting costs by firing development staff.

Seems like an almost inevitable end.

Evernote was a great app once upon a time. I'm still not aware of anything that works quite like it. Unfortunately they decided to take too much outside money, which put pressure on them to grow revenue by finding new kinds of customers. They started adding "team" features that no one wanted (work chat?) while neglecting the core features everyone relied on. Prices went up.

Nothing left to do but move on.

I just copy pasted all my notes into Obsidian, which doesn’t constantly nag me to subscribe

I was a user since August 2008 and became a paying user shortly afterwards, it had fantastic OCR which never failed to amaze when I showed it to people. I used to be one of it's biggest fans, always demoing it to friends and colleagues and got a company I worked for to use Evernote for Business back in around 2014 and it was around this time when things started to go wrong.

Notes I synced from a Windows Client disappeared, the Android app regularly had problems syncing and often had to reinstall the app and sync everything again. They rewrote the Web App with less functionality and it was a lot slower. Evernote Business was just confusing for a regular user.

There was a period where they just appeared side tracked with too many shiny projects, Evernote Food, Skitch, rewrites to apps that previously just worked. It eventually got to the point that I just could no longer trust Evernote, notes were just not on my devices and features I used weren't there anymore.

I have been searching for a replacement for years. I am now using Notion, but there are some big missing features for me:

Offline sync in phone apps, OCR, Location, integration with a scanner.

I stopped paying for Evernote around 4 years ago, after being a paid subscriber for over a decade. I gave it a try again about 18 months ago but it was still slow, so gave up and started extracting the data I needed.

It's sad to see a product that I used constantly and recommended so much, disintegrate into an unusable product due to poor company decisions.

Moving to plain-text and markdown a few years ago was my best decision. I encrypt all my notes and store them encrypted on GitHub. I don't want my private data to be handled by unprofessionals.

I know some of the folks at Bending Spoons, and I'm quite confident that they'll manage to get something good out of Evernote - eventually. It's a team of smart folks that so far has managed to get all of their apps right.

I don't think there was an easy/painless way out of this though. Evernote has been agonizing for years, it placed too many wrong bets, its developments had basically stalled for the past 3 years or so. It faced the dilemma of how to appeal its base of power users who wanted tons of powerful features (Feedly/RSS integration, search engine snippets, HTML scraping, IFTTT rules etc.) for free / affordable prices, while developing new features that could also appeal a wider userbase and justify a subscription, all while staying profitable in the process.

It wasn't an easy problem to solve. Me and many others realized it a while ago, and simply moved on to other solutions - from Pocket to save links, to Instapaper to keep an organizing list of scraped content, to Notion for all kind of extra integrations, to open-source solutions like Miniflux, Wallabag or Nextcloud Notes, or even Obsidian.

I wish the best of luck to the new Bending Spoon adventure. I'm sure that something good will come out of it, but it'll probably not be an app that I'll use anymore. Competition in this field today is much fiercer than it was a decade ago when Evernote was the undisputed king.

This is sad. Evernote was phenomenal and I really loved it, years ago.

It was only a matter of time.

Great software in the early 2010s, when it had no good competitors. But with the software quality decline, dubious decisions by the last 2 CEOs, and intense competition, it was bound to die when interest rates rose.

I recommend downloading a copy of your account data immediately.

Notion has an easy Evernote importer. Obsidian import is much more convoluted, but can be done. Or you can probably download your notes as .enex and import them into the old Evernote client to use offline.

Sorry for the staff who’ve lost their jobs. I did a phone screen with one of their recruiters a couple years back. They told me they couldn’t afford my (slightly above market rate) salary, but went on and on about how the company enjoyed a very “comfortable” work life balance. WLB is great, but I’ve never had a recruiter spend so much time on that and so little on the “exciting” product/role. That was a red flag to me at the time.

I was there when lifehack blogs will continuously talk about a newly released note taking app(Wunderlist, Evernote, OneNote, etc.)

After trying several apps, including evernote, it felt they had too many features that made them too complex for my simple use case.

After trying several methods, my stable workflow is: - Dropbox markdown file for year long notes. - Google Keep for (shared) checkbox lists & multimedia notes. - Unread emails + snoozing for TODO tasks.

Would that not be a great idea... Create an Obsidian (or Chrome, for that matter) plugin where everyone can add scraping plugins that uses e.g. Chrome instrumentation to scrape out your content based on the SAAS walled garden you're using, and dumps it in a set of .md and .jpg/.mov files.

So I could that way dump out my Tinder chats (I don't use Tinder, but I imagine you can chat there?) just as well as my Youtube videos, my Evernote notes, my Todoist tasks, etc.

A meta tool. Let's raise some millions and push the content into our own walled garden. Just joking.

obsidian is worth looking at imo

Now I want to set up a Patreon or Go Fund Me to fund an open source web clipper by those who worked on Evernote’s.

I’ve never really found anything that worked that well.

Have been using notes on macOS, works great. I do worry that notes are stored in a proprietary format, would love to have a backup in markdown...

How can I download my notebooks on a free account? The internet says to use the desktop app, but I can't log in there without upgrading.

Ah, that would explain it. I've run into three fairly major bugs in about as many weeks. It's like they're not doing regression testing at all, and rather than fixing bugs, they just keep rushing out new "features".

Problem is nothing else fits my workflow as well as Evernote does, but looks like I likely won't have a choice. Guess it's time to give Joplin a try.

Now official: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/evernote-layoffs-moving-...

I remember when Evernote launched and everyone was super hyped about it -- even some of the biggest VC names promoted them. Not to mention the funding they raised ($290M). It was literally iOS Notes on steroids. I even used it for awhile, but somehow it didn't stick.

They hired bunch of great people and had some good backend tech -- sad to see this happen to them.

I'm still using Evernote. It's become painful. Does anyone have a recommendation for a comparable service? Perhaps one that'll allow me to port everything over easily? ;)

I've migrated away from Evernote when they converted their MacOS and iOS apps from native to "Electron based". Simple things you expect from a "note taking app" to handle, like, search through text files, or "selecting multiple notes" were severely limited due to the technology limitations.

You could only select 50 items per time in the new "javascript" based desktop version, because that was too much state for react to handle.

The other thing that they broke was the apple pencil support. Using it would result in several seconds of latency.

I was a paying customer at this time, I've canceled my subscription entirely. I checked the app a few times after that to see if they managed to improve anything, the didn't. It only got worst.

So, if you have a native app, you have a moat with it, don't ruin your only opportunity to stand out.

Ha. Interesting reading through the comments. I recently downgraded everything in Evernote after seeing that Evernote was reporting 3 different service tiers for my account in different places. I kept getting nagged to re-up. I finally did and in the process, with a HIGH degree of intention, selected the "monthly" slider fully planning to cancel my account while salvaging some of the notes.

Lo and behold, unbelievably, Evernote somehow still charges me the annual rate. Absolute transaction dark pattern happening in there somewhere/somehow.

This is after a long sequence of ineffective exchanges with support regarding my tier, and also a long period of being a customer (10 years?) and seeing basically zero feature development in line with long-running community requests.

Net/net: I'm done with Evernote. Just ain't working for me.

THIS APPEARS TO BE UNSOURCED.

There's a TechCrunch article about layoffs of 129 people in February, a Wikipedia edit today (July 6) links to that implying that it's happened now instead of 4+ months ago and also states (unsourced) that the 129 is more than half the remaining staff (the article link was retrieved today but is from Feb). The price increase referenced was announced in April 2023 and took effect in May so also not new.

The Wikipedia article has now been updated to reflect the above.

Edit: I see that OP has noted that it was heard directly from affected employees, with 98 gone and ~30 remaining (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36619945)

My main use case for evernote was for storing recipes for cooking -- the web capture archiving on mobile or desktop was quite nice.

Whats a good alternative for this? Apple notes?

Can obsidian actually do this?

Sad to lose this.

Also if anyone wants some veg cooking recipes I have 270 of them for a limited time

> How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about.

A company I worked for did the same thing. They got rid of basically all of the staff and just outsourced everything to cut costs. I'd assume that's the plan here.

They don't. And it's quite simple, and to be expected (because after a acquisition this happens every. single. time).

Bending Spoons only bought the assets, code, architecture and brand. They laid off the entire staff because ALL of Evernotes operations are taken over by Bending Spoons.

The same thing will, for example, also more than likely happen when finally Adobe manages to merge with Figma. Why keep the Figma staff on payroll if you have more than capable staff yourself?

Every time in the last 5 years that I drive by Evernote Building on the 101 - I was shocked it was still in business. With Apple Notes chipping away at its core, and stiff competition from Notion - how long could it survive?

Evernote was briefly interesting, but they managed non-Windows clients so poorly and kept playing feature-creep calvinball so badly that I gave up on them YEARS AND YEARS AGO.

Basically, TIL that Evernote still exists. Sorta.

At the risk of I told you so, it was always a stupid idea.

Any service like this that "requires the cloud," but is personal or individual and could be replaced by completely non-cloud software WILL go obsolete.

Obsidian, et al understand this.

Evernote lost me when they changed the UI and made it take 5 taps/clicks to do what took 1 before. Was happy paying for it until then.

Now apple notes has replaced it. I tried obsidian as well but like notes better

Notion is great at migrating stuff out of Evernote.

I recently logged in and saw that upgrading to their new interface logged me out of all other devices unless I pay them.

They are starting to nickel and dime instead of innovate.

Evernote is dead.

I moved to Notesnook about 6mos ago and have been pretty happy with it. The founder is active in Discord and shipping new features about every 2wks. It's E2E encrypted and open source so you can self-host if you want to. I used their Evernote importer to move all my notes and it worked about 95% accurately (only formatting that didn't transfer correctly was the checkboxes): https://importer.notesnook.com/

I think some users want all the features and everything for free.

Evernote works well for me. It fully syncs all my notes between 2 devices. Those are my home and work computers. That's good enough for me.

If I want to look at a note on a mobile device, I use a browser in desktop mode. However I only had to do this a handful of times in all the years they went down to 2 device syncing.

I just have to deal sometimes with an offer to upgrade. So I close the popup. No big deal.

Evernote lost my note when I tapped on an email notification in Android in ~2011. Nevernote for me ever since. How. in. the. heck. do you call it Evernote if it loses your note when changing apps?!

For Evernote users, it is time to look for alternatives and migrate their existing notes. The best alternative to Evernote is Zoho Notebook. You can find out why on this blog https://www.zoho.com/blog/notebook/why-is-zohonotebook-the-b...

Please ask away any questions that you have.

Let's assume they shrink from 300 to 30 employees. After some time they adjust internal processes, focus on the original goals and main use cases, weeding out unnecessary features, and having stable applications for Desktop, web & mobile. 30 people should be sufficient to maintain & support & maybe even improve it a bit for a long time given a healthy revenue stream from loyal customers.

Not sure if something like this ever happened in the history of software. :)

> How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about

There are great note-taking apps that only a few people work on. Tana, Obsidian, Bear, UpNote come to mind, but there are many more. So it's definitely not a problem. It sucks for the old Evernote staff, but it doesn't have to suck for users, it might even be what Evernote needs, since it's pretty ancient in its feature set compared to the competition.

I was a paid user for many, many years. I helped them when they opened the Austin office, and find folks. I liked Evernote. Like 2 years ago I canceled; bugs and the features/functionality didn't justify the cost when apps like Apple Notes (free) just do the trick well-enough. This remind me that I still have content in Evernote that I need to get out (when I tried the 1st time was kind of a pain to do that).

Evernote was critically valuable for me but has degraded steadily and sadly for years now.

I began my Obsidian migration a few days ago and it's encouraging.

I found the evernote2md project on Github (https://github.com/wormi4ok/evernote2md) the best way to get from ENEX->md files with good resource references. Joplin wasn't getting it done.

I've been "trapped" with evernote for a long time because I put more than a decade's worth of stuff into it, and their exporting tools are shit. Literally I "exported" whole notebooks and what I got was just the titles of notes and no content. Ugh. Guess time to just sit down and spend a few hours doing tedious, tedious tasks for a while. Notion and Obsidian are great though.

The hard thing for me is getting an good exporter from Evernote to some .md kind of file, plus images. I searched a lot and Notion was the only alternative but there's a big hassle between "connect to evernote > export each notebook individually > import to notion > export from notion to .md" and after that 30% of your notes is still missing.

I’ve concluded that markdown in git is the way to go. Trusting longterm Knowledge to stay put in some VC funded growth SaaS is insane

Is there a good free alternative which would sync between mac and iOS that doesn't require iCloud? My company is blocking iCloud.

Sounds like I'd better migrate my Evernote to somewhere else.

What's a good alternative that plays well with my existing Evernote data?

And for that reason I'm out. What a shame.

I tried Evernote when it came out ~2005, but it never got rid of its rough edges. There were some neat features but they were overshadowed by bugs and glaring gaps in functionality. Tried it again ~2010 to see if it improved, but it was still a no-go. ): It was always an over-hyped app.

I'm currently migrating from Apple to Obsidian.

Joplin felt like the OSS spiritual successor to Evernote for me. It’s in markdown, has a mobile app and you can self-host.

I suppose I had better hurry up and finish building https://stickerdocs.com then. If you like the EN concept but want something privacy focussed and a honest company to support you on your journey, you might want to sign up.

I am playing with the old versions of evernote from old version.com and it brings back so many memories and hopes of what the old web could one day become.

I changed the evernote web back to the classic version, and that also made me reminisce about the old days when I used to be more productive.

Those were the days.

All commercial software is rented. It's already been created and the marginal cost is Zero. You are ostensibly paying for bug fixes and new development, which is at least partly true in many cases. SaaS at least admits a rental model.

Free Software is rent-free, but development may be slow.

A possible way to migrate from Evernote to several different apps: https://www.popsci.com/diy/evernote-alternative-export/

(I have no affiliation with any of these).

I like to add, since I got slightly organized after getting my ADHD under control, you never ever price-silo your workflow as then its locked away to be leveraged against you.

Personally, I use vscode with a combo of zettelkasten and kanban boards which works quite well even for those with ADHD!

I loved Evernote. And then they decided to make fancy and expensive notebooks, pens and paper and stopped working on the product itself, or so it seemed. They really lost focus. And then the price changing.

It was a wonderful product in the early 2010s.

Why is Anytype https://anytype.io/ not on this page somewhere? It should be.

Spent the last few days trying to find a hosted (paid) service that does PDF indexing. Check out https://notejoy.com/

Posting as a lover of the tool, but reflect.app is my new love-affair with note-taking. Evernote has been far too bloated for far too long. Reflect is an amazingly well built product with an awesome team behind it.

I'm personally using the Nextcloud Notes app, it covers my own needs pretty well and I have it installed on a couple of Android devices as well.

I wonder what you would suggest is the most valuable feature of proprietary solutions?

Had a nice interaction with evernote a few days ago. A hacker had logged in on my Evernote account, received an email about a login.

What stunned me was that I had to confirm by mail, but the hacker from Taiwan didn't have to.

Looks exactly like the follow-up to an "Our Incredible Journey" post.

What is your source for this?

Timely thread about Joplin, an open-source alternative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611355

When I once updated Evernote in 2015 and it got worse, I just reverted and never updated again. I've been using the same version of Evernote for over 8 years for free and it's amazing.

Wild that Bending Spoons doesn’t even list Evernote as an app they own. https://bendingspoons.com/

Microsoft being allowed to leverage its enterprise word/ppt/xls trench and bundle OneNote/Teams without anti-trust regulators batting an eye is what kills these companies.

Evernote's server side technical stack is nightmare. This is definitely for better, to completely replace it with something modern and adequate.

I've been an Evernote user since 2008 and a paying one for most of that. The other week I tried to go through some old notes. Half of them wouldn't load. Looking to leave now.

I don’t know where to store all my tons of scanned paper documents to be automatically OCRed, searchable, and accessible on all devices :( Do you know any other solutions?

I am so glad I migrated off all my notes from Evernote, their limitations and popups triggered some red flags I was not willing to risk.

This proved me right, thanks!

Wow, they even doubled the price of the personal plan..

I use it occasionally but to that amount it's not worth it. I need to figure out a way to export my data and then I'm out.

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

I doubt many people do anymore, which is probably the reason it's being dismantled. Sic transit gloria mundi.

is it possible that staff had some type of vesting rights in an acquisition that layoffs would terminate? (Yeah, it's not a nice thing to do, but the buyer has the leverage and no loyalty to the past, and they they call the shots in terms of sweetening the deal.) if so, Bending Spoons may plan to keep investing in product development, but they want to do it at market rates, not bonus rates.

- What is the best way to export Evernote into plain text?

- Is there a good way to export the notes so that it preserves stacks and notebook structures?

> How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about.

They will probably use their Italian in-house dev teams instead?

We do have Notion (and alternatives), who needs Evernote now ? Evernote should have an exporting tool to import into Notion instead.

I feel like any product that competes with free ones and does not have a technical wall is going to fail eventually.

There are ways to import data into other apps such as Logseq or Obsidian, so I'd search for an alternative now.

AFAIK, Bending Spoons is a company that successfully launched a couple of mobile apps and they know how to make a living out of it.

According to an engineer who works for them and who I know, it’s a very demanding and stressing environment to work in. Probably they simply plan to throw more work at their existing employees.

The plan was to buy Evernote and make it profitable. It wouldn’t surprise me if they kill the project if it turns out not to be profitable.

Sad ending for a great product. I've been using Simplenote since 2015 and it's been refreshingly consistent.

Thanks. I just exported my notes and deleted my account. Between this and Reddit, tis the season to cancel accounts.

Subjectively, the app has improved its offline mode and cross-device sync since the company has been acquired.

I can't believe people made >= $1 billion from a note-taking app that loses data.

Personally, been using OneNote for over 10 years. Never jumped to any other hyped note-taking app.

If you buy into a cloud service this risk should always be top of your list.

one long plain text file is all you need.

easy to back up and replicate if need be.

Can someone tell me a better way to export Evernote content?

Replaced it with Joplin a year ago. Very happy paying user.

Wow, I thought people stopped using Evernote in like 2017

Is there an easy way to just export all my stuff?

Which alternative note taking apps offer a web clipper? I just found

- Evernote

- Onenote

- Notion

- Joplin

Are there any other?

feels like notion is gonna be the next evernote

RIP.

tomboy/gnote

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