Last month, Jason alerted readers to Evernote’s recent price hike. It’s a hefty increase (for Premium users, from $49.99/year to $69.99).
I’m a longtime user of Evernote, and have found it very powerful for organizing information and locating it quickly. (I took the time a few years ago to go through my notes, winnow them, and organize them using the system Michael Hyatt describes in this post from a couple of years ago.) I’ve found the software so powerful that, for a number of years, I’ve paid for a Premium subscription and never regretted it.
But — a $20/year increase? That’s a 40% hike, and it’s prompted me to make the move to one of the options Jason mentioned: Microsoft’s OneNote.
This isn’t a decision I’ve made lightly; there’s a significant cost of time and effort involved in making the switch. I had to consider carefully whether that cost was worth the $20 yearly savings. (I’ll recommend a more recent post of Mr. Hyatt’s, “The High Cost of Shortsighted Frugality,” to readers for their consideration.)
Why did I come to the conclusion that the costs of switching were worth it for me? There are a number of reasons:
- Evernote’s Premium subscription is a recurring cost. If the extra $20 were a one-off cost, I likely wouldn’t bother switching, at least not at this point. But making the switch adds up to more significant savings over time.
- As much as I love Evernote, there are things that I’ve long wished it had that OneNote does, such as the ability to organize notes into tabs (great for keeping track of class-related items), and the ability to mix a variety of note types on different parts of a single page.
- OneNote for the Mac still hasn’t quite caught up with OneNote for Windows, but it’s come a long way. (The most significant recent change for me is the addition of page templates.)
- OneNote doesn’t cost anything, at least as long as your total OneDrive storage doesn’t exceed 25GB. Right now I’m well under that, even after transferring the entire content of my Evernote account to OneNote. So it’s not just the additional $20 per year that I’ll be saving. I’ll be freeing up an additional $49.99 each year. Over time, that adds up.
It’s the combination of these factors that convinced me it’s time to switch to OneNote. Any one of them alone wouldn’t have been sufficient.
That’s the why. In my next post, I’ll go into more detail about the how.
Are you an Evernote user? Will you be sticking with Evernote, or switching to some other service? What factors are important to you in making the decision?
[Lead image by Flickr user Brad P.]
