Why I Broke Up with Evernote After 13 Years

As subscription business models continue to expand I believe it’s time to pay more attention to the subscriber’s experience. Buyer behavior has changed and continues to evolve, but one of the consistent areas that buyers look for is advice on purchase decisions from peers. Since you as a subscription business don’t control that peer channel at all, you have to think through how you can try to leverage that influence channel. A successful subscription business survives long term on renewals, not just new business. Create experiences that encourage customers to advocate for you, or at least have a positive opinion of your brand. Or, said another way, the way you treat your subscribers has a direct impact on your business, positive or negative.

A Subscriber Experience Story

I had an educational customer / subscriber experience this week that's worth looking at to see what lessons are there, particularly in the context of subscriber experience and advocacy. The background to the story is that my preferred note taking platform since 2008 has been Evernote. It’s one of the few apps that I use every day. I switched from freemium to a paid plan pretty early, since I was putting so much into the app that I did not want them to fail (fremium is a good model, but obviously you need customers to upgrade to a paid plan to survive). I've had opportunity to switch repeatedly, sometimes with more features, sometimes less, but I always figured it was just better and easier to stay with Evernote. The value I received made the price I paid for it acceptable. Was I an advocate, yes, I did recommend Evernote to many, many people through the years.

A few weeks ago I was invited to beta test a new Evernote task list function which I happily did. The feature is good so I filled it up and did away with other task tracking solutions (I especially liked attaching the task to a note). A few days ago I went in to the app to update some tasks and plan out the next week only to find that the feature was locked and that I had to upgrade to access it (and the tasks I had already put on the list were blurred out). No warning, no notice and no way to get to the task list even to move them to another list.

As I tried to figure out how to get the feature back, I found that my plan, "premium" was being replaced with new tiered plans. Tiering the offering more is not a bad strategy but it was surprising that I wasn't notified that the plan I was on was eliminated. The personal plan looked pretty much like "premium" plan I was on, but included the task list feature. Unfortunately it is priced at more than double what I was paying already, but it was the cheapest of the 3 plans. There was no mention of the 9 months I had left on my previous (prepaid, auto renewing) plan that I had renewed and paid for in April 2021 for a year. I assumed that I would get credit for the remaining 9 months on checkout. Sadly though I was charged for the new plan with no mention of the previous plan payment and remaining paid term.

Not a good experience but I did give them room for the possibility that it was just a mistake. I looked for a way to get support but could only find a forum, no direct way to contact them (later I learned that I could get support when I was on an upgraded plan). My next source of help is usually Twitter so I posted there mentioning the Evernote account. I was probably a little agitated by then, so maybe it wasn’t my normal nice inquiry. I also posted a longer version on LinkedIn (which formed the core of this post actually) and of course tagged Evernote there as well.

Time for a New Solution

While waiting for a response I started to look for alternatives, something I hadn’t done in years. As I looked around, one of the key issues was having a way to move content from Evernote to the new solution since I had a lot of content that I needed to use. There was I believe, at some point, a way to download all your notes in Evernote but that had disappeared (not even a way to back up the data). One alternative that’s been around for a long time, and that I already had on my Mac was Microsoft OneNote (included in my Office365 subscription). I thought I remembered a utility that would move your notes over, but unfortunately it’s no longer supported by Microsoft and did not work for me.

I searched for alternatives that had some way to move the content out of Evernote and also had enough features that it met my ongoing needs (cross platform, app and web based, long list of features, etc.). After some research I found a replacement that had more features than Evernote, had a utility built in to integrate to Evernote, was cross platform…in other words it more than met my requirements. It was not perhaps as “pretty” as Evernote from a UI perspective but still, was worth a trial (free trial of course, and also offered me a discount for switching from Evernote…clearly they understand their target market). I installed Notion and started trying it while I waited for an answer from Evernote.

I used Notion, watched some YouTube videos (it’s a very powerful program and you definitely need a bit of instruction) and learned that it more than met my needs, and in fact did other things that would replace other apps I use, consolidating them into one place. Bottom line, it did more for less…I was hooked.

Around 36 hours later with nothing more than an ask for my email from Evernote, but no actual contact or response beyond that, I downgraded to a free plan to save some older content “just in case”. I’m now a Notion convert. Oh, and a few days later I did get an answer, here it is.

And yes, I’m sure they were busy in support after the way they rolled out the plan changes. I'm sure you see the problem with the response, there's no mention of the remaining term on my "legacy" Premium subscription, no acknowledgement of my long relationship and no apology.

Lessons Learned

Rather that being negative, after all I found a better alternative to something I’ve used and renewed for 13 years or so, let’s look at the lessons in this (very long, sorry) story:

• Customers expect you to communicate with them BEFORE making changes to features and subscription plans. Particularly if it does away with their plan or changes it significantly.

• Customers expect that you will provide a reasonable upgrade path if you change the subscription plans and change / eliminate their plan. This includes giving them credit for a paid subscription that is in place. If you really want to make your subscriber happy, offer them a similar plan for whatever they have already paid for the remaining term. Then the price goes up. Keeping a subscriber is way more valuable than the few dollars more you might get by charging them full price up front. It's called net dollar retention (NDR) and is a key metric for successful subscription companies.

• Customers expect that if you offer new beta features to them to test, that you'll warn them clearly that the plan they're on does not qualify for this feature going forward. Providing them time to make sure they don’t lose any data when the feature goes away would also be a better experience.

• It is to your advantage to offer long time customers a special deal when you change the subscription packaging. (I know, I already said this, but it’s important enough to say twice). You need your advocates to continue to support you.

• Loyal customers (13+ years) don't stay loyal when they believe you mistreated them.

The sad part of the story for Evernote is that I likely wouldn’t have had time to look for any alternatives if I had not had a bad experience. I am happier with Notion, but I wound’t have known that if I had not been mistreated enough to look at what else was available. Also, as I provide advice to peers and clients, I won’t recommend Evernote anymore, instead I will advocate for my new favorite note taking app, Notion.

The whole experience shows that there's a need for more discussion on the best practices for providing a "good" subscriber experience. Look for another subscriber experience post in the next few days.