Evernote is forcing a decision on me
As a creature of app habit, I’ve kept paying for Evernote even as the rates for my note-taking app of choice have increased considerably–mainly because the new management at that service has improved it tremendously. But now that Evernote’s corporate parent Bending Spoons has discontinued my $129.99/year Personal plan and presented me with a choice between a $99.99/year Starter plan that seems clearly inadequate and a $249.99/year Advanced plan that brings more than I need, I need to rethink that habit.
That 92% rate increase itself requires reconsideration, but it’s not the only thing. There’s the odds of a company on a venture-capital-fueled spending spree that somehow incluces buying AOL will see fit to jack up the annual rate again; I also have to assess whether Evernote’s bosses might make it harder to take my data out of the app that I’ve used since 2010.
But looking over such other note-taking app options as OneNote, Joplin, and Notion while comparing their features, I don’t see an obvious escape pod.
These are my priorities in this indecision-making process, in rough order of descending importance:
- Cross-platform support–macOS, Windows, Android, iOS–is not negotiable, which is why I didn’t mention Apple Notes above.
- I need any other app to import my Evernote archives no less than one notebook at a time; that seems to rule out Microsoft’s OneNote, even though I pay for it as part of my Microsoft 365 subscription.
- I need reliable synchronization, ideally the almost real-time sync that Evernote now does so well. That may be the thing I need to trade to shave all or part of $250 a year from my online-services budget.
- Yearly cost below this year’s $129.99.
- Offline support, because I know how well CES WiFi works.
- Voice transcription for recording interviews, which I’ve come to rely on over the past year.
- Text recognition from a photo of a business card, so I can look up the details of somebody I met without adding them to my contacts list.
- Robust export options so I don’t get stuck in another company’s silo.
- The option of encrypting at least some notes on an end-to-end basis.
- A long-term focus from the app’s developers–why I don’t consider Google Keep, since Google introducing that a week after killiing Google Reader still leaves me with trust issues beyond my trying to reduce the number of single points of failure in my digital life.
Looking over this and comparing it to the research I’ve done so far, I think this makes me look like a Joplin user. Unless the lag that open-source app cites–the most frequent sync interval it allows for the OneDrive cloud storage I already pay for is every five minutes–instead makes me look like somebody who should suck up the extra cost of Evernote, considering what a small fraction it is of my other operating costs.
I wish this choice were clearer. I also wish that I didn’t have to figure this out at the peak cognitive-load period of my year.
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