With the advent of price increases having hit Evernote, I’m forced to reevaluate the usefulness of this product for me and the manner in which I use it.

BTW, I don’t see mentioned by anyone yet that Evernote did send out a survey quite a few months ago (if I remember correctly) that asked very specific questions about the “future” of services and how much a customer would be willing to pay. I know for a fact that I sure as heck didn’t select prices like this in my survey.

I’ve been using Evernote since 2008, mostly using the “Freemium” version. The last three to four years I’ve been a “Premium” user. The reason why I switched to Premium had nothing to do with features, space, privileges that paying for the Premium brought me. Trust me I never even exceeded 1GB of data a month.

The ONLY reason why I had started to pay for Premium was I thought that Evernote was going above and beyond my expectations in product enhancement and development. I felt they “deserved” and “earned” my support for the product/service… so the best way I could show my support would be to pay for it.

I’ve been a proponent of Evernote for a long time and while not terribly active in the “forums” on Evernote… I’ve always tried to share my passion for the product on Quora. I especially liked the fact I could bring in my Livescribe Smart Pen notes into Evernote.

$45 a year wasn’t so bad. However what people don’t take into consideration when they argue that the new increased price is not bad (then they break it down to how many pennies a day the item may cost you) is that so many more services have month-to-month subscriptions. So for some folks, there is a lot of nickel-and-diming going on between all of the services we may be subscribed to… and they keep adding up. So when you consider all of the services you might subscribe to, e.g., Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Office 365, Plex, Xbox Gold, maybe even a mail server (Exchange) and website host… things start to add up quickly and you have to decide where/which service you will need to cull from the herd. Since I paid for… yet never needed any of the features or benefits of Premium, I need to figure out what’s best for “me.”

I’ve never been a fan of OneNote, the reason being is it was a product originally developed with “pen/inking” in mind. Because of that in combination with the free-for-all “sandbox” approach to constructing a note… the software never really “printed” well for me. In fact, printing wasn’t even on the original radar when the app was developed because back then everyone was still drinking the Kool-Aid of having a “Paperless Office.” We see how that turned out. So those are the reasons why I never adopted OneNote.

Which brings me to today… I subscribe to Office 365 (Home) which runs $99, only $30 more than Evernote Premium alone.

What do I get for that?

• 1-year subscription

• For 5 PCs or Macs, 5 tablets including iPad, Android, or Windows, plus 5 phones
• Fully installed versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and more e.g., Sway and Docs.com
• 1TB cloud storage per user for up to 5 users
• Ongoing access to updates
• Word
• Excel
• PowerPoint
• OneNote
• Access
• Publisher
• Outlook
• OneDrive
• Skype

Seems like a no brainer (for me). But what would I lose if anything (just using Premium features as an example compared to Plus at $35 a year)?

• 10GB versus 1GB (again, not a huge loss as I never exceeded 1GB anyway)
• Customer support via live chat (not important never used)
• Search for text in PDFs (only important if you have a lot of PDFs in your notebooks, for me not a feature used)
• Search for text in Office docs (I go to the source app anyway)
• Annotate PDFs Scan and digitize business cards (use Xodo for PDF annotation and it’s awesome, use Office Lens for business cards that goes directly to OneNote)
• Present notes in one click (a really cool feature, I thought they did a great job with it, but with PowerPoint not needed)
• Browse the history of your notes (Meh…)
• See related notes and content (Meh…)

Now I will say that an added incentive for me is that I pay $99 a year for my (Microsoft Alumni Network) which includes many other benefits along with Office 365 (Home). So for this reason, I will be letting my Evernote Premium expire at the end of my contract and not renew at any level, and that’s even with the “Valued Subscriber” grandfathering of the next year. Why should I pay for another year after this contract expires… only to prolong the inevitable?

Again… everyone needs to be paid for services and products they deliver. But looking back at the questions and pricing options in the survey… the percentage of increase is exorbitant (for me).

Thank you Evernote for a good product.