Evernote is a fairly widely-used tool for corralling and then exploring information. There have been numerous posts about Evernote here at ProfHacker, such as Shawn Miller’s introduction to the tool, Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s testimonial as an Evernote convert, Amy’s account of teaching with it, and a variety of posts about using Evernote on your phone, with Markdown, or in web browsers.
There is a long tradition of speculating on Evernote’s business model--although it has a lot of users, most of them have been of the free variety.
Yesterday, however, Evernote announced a change to their pricing structure: instead of syncing your data across all your devices, free accounts will only be able to sync across two. “Plus” accounts get you all your devices, an email to forward information to, and a little bit of cloud storage; “premium” accounts get even more storage, the ability to search inside documents, mark up PDFs, and have Evernote suggest connections between your notes. Plus accounts are $3.99/month, and Premium is $7.99.
If you’re a free Evernote user, and don’t want to upgrade to a paid tier, you might check out this list of Evernote alternatives. (We’ve looked at OneNote a few times in the past.) Also, if you’re a Mac user with a current version of the operating system, you might want to look at Notes, which got a *lot* better this year, and includes a mechanism for importing your Evernote library.
If you’re a free Evernote user, are you likely to switch to paid? Do you have an alternative digital notetaking service? Please share in comments!
Photo “Folders” by Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0
