Evernote's top plan now costs $250 a year, up from $130

Evernote's top subscription now costs $250 a year. Some users who paid $130 a year were moved to that price after the note-taking app changed its tiers earlier this year. The top plan costs more than 3.3 times what the most advanced plan cost in 2023. It is 10 times what Evernote charged for yearly plans from its 2008 launch until 2016.

Not just Evernote

Other long-running apps have followed the same path. A lifetime pass for Plex, a media app, cost $75 in 2012 and costs $250 today. Plex's price rose 525 percent over two increases since March 2024. Individual plans for Quicken, Robokiller and Inkdrop have each doubled.

Why Evernote did it

Evernote's owner, Bending Spoons, bought the app in 2023. In a June filing with the SEC, the US financial regulator, it said it was drawn to Evernote's 200 million accounts and high user engagement. The filing says new sign-ups had been falling for years, then rose 29 percent in 2024 and 20 percent in 2025. Slow growth was not the reason for the higher prices.

Instead, the company ran more than 200 experiments from 2023 to 2025, including tests of different price points. Shortly after the purchase, the monthly price went from $8 to $15 and the yearly price from $70 to $130. Average revenue per monthly active user was 2.5 times as high in 2025 as in 2022.

Limits that nudge you to pay

Bending Spoons also opened some paid features to free users, then added usage limits to certain features. Hitting a limit became a major reason people subscribed. In 2025, such limits accounted for 51 percent of all conversions, meaning free users who turned into paying ones. Evernote reportedly reached record profitability by November 2024, after being called unprofitable for years.

A smaller developer's view

Inkdrop, a note-taking app, doubled its price in 2024 from $5 to $10 a month, or $50 to $100 a year. It was the first change in seven years. Its creator, Takuya Matsuyama, wrote that he would rather have a few thousand customers who really like the app than more than 10,000 broader ones.

What to do

• List the apps you pay for and what each costs per year.
• Check whether a cheaper tier or a grandfathered price is available.
• Ask whether you still use each app enough to justify the cost.

The article notes that developers could soften increases with grandfathered pricing for longtime customers, extra perks, advance warning or more subscription tiers. Whether any given company will do so is not stated.