Goodbye Evernote
After more than a decade of entrusting Evernote with my notes, I finally left the service.
I started taking notes seriously with Evernote more than 10 years ago. Note taking is a wheel that has been re-invented over and over again a few times. Allowing people to write notes is the easy part. After all, we have had word processing software for decades, physical notebooks for centuries and clay tables for millennia. The difficult part of the job is how to store them safely and retrieve them quickly. Evernote attracted me with two major features: (1) Notes were seamlessly backed up to the cloud, and (2) Attachment files can be added to a note.
We all take those features for granted now. Billions of smart phone users around the world now can have their data backed up to the cloud automatically free. The duopoly of Apple and Google both operated a freemium model where the first few gigabytes of data are free. Those limits are more than enough for the critical data of most people. In fact, you can store many life times worth of notes free, forever.
Going back more than 10 years ago, cloud was not a word that was popularly used. And Evernote’s features were revolutionary! Evernote was one of the pioneering cloud services that solved a particular user problem really well. It took the burdens of storage and backup away from the user and put a function text search feature onto its client app. It allowed me to become an intense note taker.
It was not an exaggeration to say that my whole life’s information was stored in Evernote. From the banal daily stuff like reading notes, my brain-dump and ideas, to interesting quotes I came across or recipes I enjoyed, to the pdf books and digital backup of my documents, to my national insurance number and usernames/passwords. Alright, the last few were over-the-top and I have learned better about security, but I hope you got my point here.
I was not a geeky exception. There were millions of people around the world falling in love with taking notes on the green elephant app. It was very much an extension of our brain. A song was written about the it with lyrics went “I wanna help the world remember / I wanna go extend their brains”. Phil Libin, the showman-style chief executive of the company at the time declared that Evernote aspired to be “the Nike for your mind”.
The company rode the way to become a unicorn. It raised a total of $290M to date and was evaluated at £2B in 2015. But a long the way, the company lost its ways. I could name any meaningful new features that have been added to the app for the last 10 years. The app did not mature well either. Jason Kincaid detailed many problems in his blog titled “Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant” in 2014. The company’s latest CEO admitted in 2019 that “each version of Evernote seems to work slightly differently, and exhibits its own unique collection of bugs and undesirable behaviours”.
Evernote needed to be less generous with their free-tier users to survive. I got that. Extending people’s brains for free is great for generating good will but does not make economic sense, unless you can convert good will into recurring revenue. The last straw for me was the flashing warning on the app about imminent changes to the free-tier users coming soon, without specifying the exact details. My notes were critical to me but a subscription of £4.99 per month was too stiff a price. I were already paying Google £1.59 for 100GB of storage and Apple £6.99 for 2TB. Evernotes’ pricing model did not stack up for me.
The end was nigh. It only took a few hours to export all of my data from Evernote and import them into Apple’s Notes. I could only select only 50 notes at a time to export to .ENEX file, but the process was very smooth and quick. The text and photos were both transitioned correctly. Some formatting was lost but it was not a big issue. I had so much respect for Evernote for making the transitioning away process pain free. I feared it would have been far worse but that did not materialise.
There were nothing else but appreciation that I could say about Evernote. They have given me a decent app to take note and store them free for me over the last decade. Sadly, the world moved on and there were now better and more compelling service out there. And the elephant kept marching at the same place.
Goodbye the green elephant and thank you for the ride. I am not with you anymore but your spirit lives on.
