When Phil Libin, Evernote’s co-founder realised he only had a few weeks’ worth of cash left for the business back in 2008, he had to make the tough call to shut everything down. One night, a mail appeared in Phil’s inbox from a Swedish fan of the app—he was ready to invest a small amount of $500,000.
Today, Evernote is one of the most popular note-taking apps in the market, especially in Japan.
I recently decided to go through the motions and re-evaluate what they charge for. Right now, Evernote charges for a multitude of things—number of devices in sync, media upload and note size, webpage clipping etc. Here is what their pricing page looks like.
Is this really the right way to go? I answered a few small questions first before tackling the big one.
Is Evernote ready for monetization?
1. Retention: As one of the market leaders in the note-taking and task management apps category, Evernote’s retention is a “smile curve” which is a big green flag for its monetization readiness because it indicates that even after users drop off, they return to the app because they don’t find a better alternative.
Source: Sequoia
Source: SimilarWeb
Over the last 3 months, Evernote’s website has averaged 28.5M views, and its competitors (Bear, Todoist, OneNote) have averaged lower views. Another green flag.
2. Engagement: To gauge the level of engagement of Evernote users, I conducted a survey taking into account that the natural frequency of the app is daily.
User #1 | User #2 | User #3 | User #4 | |
Plan | Free | Paid recurrently (monthly) | Paid recurrently (monthly) | Free |
Use case | Daily journaling, noting down ideas, clip content from web to read later | Jotting down notes from meetings, and ideas when they occur at random times of the day | Jotting down notes from meetings, track my tasks and attempt to structure raw thoughts | Jotting down notes on meetings, ideas, work etc. |
Time spent on the app | 30 minutes/day | 45 minutes/day | 25 minutes/day | 20 minutes/day |
From this table, we can see that no matter what plan (free/paid) a user in on, they tend to average 30 minutes on Evernote daily which tells us that the majority of users are core and power users.
The more I store in Evernote, the more likely I am to get value when I do a search. The accruing benefits continue, and I just keep on adding more and more to Evernote and realising more and more value from it. The flipside of this is that I can’t ever imagine leaving Evernote — it’s truly become an extension of my brain.
- Sarah, a user of Evernote
Is there willingness to pay?
Source: Referralcandy
In 2009, it was observed that while most freemium products see users converting within a short time, the % of Evernote users that were upgrading to the paid version within a month was only 0.5%.
However, the % of Evernote users that were upgrading when they hit the 1-year-usage mark was a whopping 8%. The Inc article talking about the company when it won “2011 company of the year”, describes the product as one “whose customers are so dedicated that many eventually choose to pay for the service, even though they can use it for free.”
Yes, there is definitely a strong willingness to pay.
What are some substitutes and their prices?
Use case of Evernote is note-taking and task management. Some apps that can be used for the same purposes are Bear, OneNote, Todoist, any device’s notes app and Google Keep but we can also use a physical notebook with a pen as well as a calendar for the same purposes.
Substitute name | Flexibility to use | Fixed cost | Pricing |
Bear | Difficult, it’s only available to use on Apple devices | Low | Has a free plan, $1.49/month for the pro plan |
OneNote | Medium, you need a Microsoft 365 subscription to get its full value but it syncs across devices | Very high | Has a free plan, premium comes with microsoft 365 subscription which costs $6.99/month |
Todoist | Easy, it’s available on all OSs and it syncs across devices | High | Has a free plan, $4/month for the pro plan and $6/month for the business plan |
Google Keep | Easy, you only need a Google account to use it on any device and it syncs across devices | Low | Free to use with a Google account with a limit on storage, storage increase (100 GB) costs $1.99/month |
Physical notebook | Easy, but it does not come with necessary features for a lot of note-taking and task tracking (categories, tags, calendar, reminders etc) and there is a limit to the number of pages as well | Low | Price varies from Rs. 20 - Rs. 1000 |
Device’s notes app | Easy, but it does not come with necessary features for a lot of note-taking and task tracking | Very low | Free |
What should Evernote charge for?
After listing down all the features available in Evernote, I asked users which of those they would be willing to pay for.
Evernote features:
- Notebooks (collection of notes organised by location or purpose)
- Export notebooks into PDFs
- Create + use available note templates
- Audio notes
- To-do list
- Calendar
- Document scanner (whiteboards, handwritten notes, receipts etc.)
- Clip and save from the web
- Sync between devices
- “Home” - customisable homepage with widgets like calendar, shortcuts, tasks and notes you can move around.
- Search
- Integrations with Slack, Gmail, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams and more
- Upload size
- Note size
- Version history
- Permission controls
- Two-step verification
- Support tickets filing option
Sync between devices was a feature all of the users valued and were willing to pay for. Other popular features that users said that they would pay for are — integrations with Gmail, Slack etc, Clip and save from the web and document scanner.
For the question “what would make you pay more?”, I received varying feature requests from audio transcription of languages other than English to collaboration enhancements for note-taking. An interesting observation is that these feature asks (as well as each user’s use case) for Evernote were primarily revolving around only note-taking, even though Evernote provides task management features as well. This tells us that Evernote’s core value prop is the unlimited note-taking capabilities it offers.
Source: Survey I counducted
In conclusion,
