Evernote testing new limits on free users hoping they will pony up for a paid account
The Evernote elephant app icon has been around for a long time and the company that purchased Evernote a little more than a year ago, Bending Spoons, is testing a plan that it hopes will bring more paid subscribers to the app from the current list of free users. TechCrunch says that it was told by the company that it is running a test that limits the number of free notes users can create but the plan has not yet been finalized.
For those unfamiliar with Evernote, it is a note-taking and task-management app. Notes are stored in virtual notebooks. One problem is that small lists can be created for free on Google Keep and while the latter does use the 15GB free storage you get from Google, notes on Keep are relatively smaller which means that you can get by using Keep for a long time before having to pay for an upgrade to your subscription.
The aforementioned test of Evernote was discovered by a subscriber who was the recipient of a pop-up note stating that Evernote was limiting him to one notebook and 50 notes unless he switched from his free tier of service to a paid tier priced at $77.99 for a year which includes a 40% discount from the regular price of $129.99.
Some Evernote users on the free tier received this popup message
However, none of this was mentioned on Evernote's website where it showed that free subscribers get 60MB of monthly uploads with a maximum upload size of 25MB. The website also shows the currently discounted personal plan ($10.83 per month) and the professional tier of service ($14.17 per month) allow subscribers to create larger notes and uploads and sync to an unlimited number of devices.
As for why the website doesn't mention the limit on free accounts to 1 notebook and 50 notes, Evernote says that it is because the change has yet to be made official. The test using these limitations on free accounts has been disseminated to less than 1% of its free users to see whether they take the bait and pony up for a paid account.
Evernote did say that the free account being tested would not limit users from editing, managing, deleting, exporting, or viewing their existing notes even if it is more than the new limit. What it will do is prevent these users from creating new notes unless they open a paid account. The big question is whether the free users take the plunge and become paid subscribers.
The Evernote app is available for iOS users from the App Store and the Google Play Store for Android users.
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