Evernote’s New Pricing Includes A Cheaper, Middle Tier And A Pricier Top Plan

As promised late last year, Evernote today has rolled out new pricing plans for its note-taking service in order to introduce a more affordable, middle tier that now falls in between the company’s free option and the full-featured premium plan, which is now $5.99 per month, up from the earlier $5 per month.

The new plans, Basic, Evernote Plus and Evernote Premium, are differentiated by features like support for offline access, larger note sizes, monthly upload allowances and collaboration features among other things.

Evernote CEO Phil Libin had said last November at the Web Summit conference in Dublin that the decision to charge $5 per month for the paid tier to Evernote’s product was kind of “random,” and that the company realized as far back as a couple of years ago that the pricing it first came up with was wrong. He said that Evernote would debut new pricing tiers in early 2015.

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There will continue to be a free version of Evernote’s service with the Basic plan, which will allow users to access Evernote on multiple devices and will support up to 60MB in monthly uploads. Individual notes can be up to 25MB on this plan.

The new middle tier, or Evernote Plus as it’s called, is $2.99 per month or $24.99 per year and is designed for more active users who need additional storage options and an expanded feature set. Plus users can upload up to 1GB per month, and can access the service offline, save emails (up to 250) into Evernote, and password-lock the app on mobile devices. This plan also increases the supported note size to 50MB.

Meanwhile, the new, now slightly more expensive Premium tier ($5.99 per month or $49.99 per year) unlocks all of Evernote’s features, including unlimited monthly uploads, all the features in Plus, as well as other advanced options like the ability to convert notes into presentations, search in Office documents and attachments, share and discuss Evernote files with colleagues, annotate attached PDFs, scan and digitize business cards and more. Notes on this plan can be up to 200MB.

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Evernote’s decision to move some of its more heavily used features – like business card scanning, for instance – into a now more expensive premium tier means that it will be able to increase the revenues from its current paid user base with little effort on its part in terms of revamping or expanding its core product. However, it may lose some of its previously $5-per-month users who now realize that all they need is the $2.99 per month plan. Of course, the flip side to that is that it may now also be able to convert more of the free users who feel more comfortable paying $2.99 per month rather than $5 for a bit more flexibility.

The above pricing is what’s available now in the U.S., but Evernote says that it has actually optimized pricing for its product in each country where it’s supported. Today, Evernote is localized in over two dozen languages and sees 70 percent of its new users coming in from Asia, including China, as well as from Brazil, Mexico and Turkey. Those users will see lower price points in some cases, as the company wants to make sure its product is “within reach” in those markets, it says.

For current paid users, Evernote says you’re locked into your rate for the year. But the new prices will kick in following your first renewal after April 29, 2016.

Evernote continues to offer a Business tier aimed at the enterprise, which includes tools for I.T. departments for administration purposes, plus things like single sign-on support and salesforce integration. Pricing for this option remains unchanged ($12 per seat or better, depending on organization size).