I received a notification that the Evernote Personal plan (B1,450) is being "discontinued" and that I will be automatically bumped to the new "Advanced" plan (B2,799), unless I intervene to cancel it. Yep, Evernote decided to help themselves to an extra B1,349 on my card. That's a 93% price increase, and they're just going to take it unless I actually take steps to stop them.

Now the "Advanced" plan is a higher tier. I don't have that many notes, but it seems that I have been pushed into "Advanced" because I have more than 20 notebooks, which is a new lower limit imposed on the "Starter" plan, which replaces "Personal".

My notes are all text, I'd be amazed if they even took up a single megabyte. "Notebooks" are literally just a category, a row in a table somewhere. They cost practically nothing to maintain. 

Subscription abuse

This entire scenario is a fabrication of their marketing department. They have just given the old plans new names and reduced the entitlements. The reduced notebook allowance - a completely artificial restriction - will push any long term user onto the higher tier where they are charged almost double. Without asking permission - unless you stop them, they will just take it.

Imagine ordering a pizza delivery from your local restaurant, and finding only half a pizza in the box but double the charge on your card. Yeah, it's like that.

And what do you think happened when I hit that 'Cancel' button on my account? Surprise, "40% discount"...on the new 93% higher fee, which is still 15% more than I paid last year. Infuriating!

Trying out Joplin

I'm trying out Joplin, which is an open source Evernote clone that lets you work in markdown if you want, and doesn't spam you with fucking popup notifications every time you open it.

The interface is almost identical, so there is no learning curve. You can sync notes to OneDrive and a couple of other services (free) or pay to use Joplin's sync service. I'm giving OneDrive a go, since I already have a subscription to that.

So far, seems fine. Importing all the notebooks individually was annoying, but that's a one-off.