Yesterday Evernote announced big changes to the way their pricing plans work, including some things that might impact you if you use Evernote to go paperless.
New Evernote Pricing Plans
- The free plan is called Evernote Basic. Maximum uploads stay the same (60 MB), and most other things stay the same with a few big exceptions which I’ll cover below.
- There is a new Evernote Plus plan. It’s $2.99/month or $24.99/year (USD). This is a new offering that allows people who want/need to pay for Evernote to do so at a lower price than the Premium plan. It has a monthly upload cap of 1GB and has a maximum note size of 50MB. You can also use offline notebooks on mobile, which was a Premium-only feature in the past.
- Evernote Premium has a bit of a price bump. It’s now $5.99/month $49.99/year (USD). The big changes are uploads are now unlimited, and the maximum note size has jumped to 200MB. Everything else is the same.
- Evernote Business also has unlimited uploads and 200MB attachments. There’s also Single Sign-on.
If you’re a current Premium customer, you’re grandfathered at the old rate for a year.
You can see a comparison chart of the Evernote plans here.
How You May Be Impacted
For those who go paperless with Evernote, the biggest change is to the free plan. I noticed two changes:
Saving Emails
Many people, myself included, forward emails in to their private Evernote email address. The notes are then created and searchable in Evernote.
This is now an Evernote Plus feature. If you want to forward your mails to Evernote, you’ll need to at least subscribe to Evernote Plus.
Searching PDFs
If you upload a PDF to Evernote that is not searchable, making it searchable has always been a Premium feature.
Traditionally, if you uploaded a PDF that is already searchable, Evernote would index the contents and allow you to search. Here’s where things get confusing.
In the FAQ about the new plans, here’s what Evernote has to say about PDFs:
Any PDF you added before April 29, 2015 will still be searchable. You’ll need to upgrade to Premium in order to search new PDFs or documents.
The comparison chart bit I show above also says “Search in PDFs, Office docs, and attachments” is a Premium feature.
However, I just did a test where I uploaded a searchable PDF to an Evernote Basic account via Evernote Web, and I could instantly search the contents.
So, who knows what is supposed to happen. It could be just poor wording on Evernote’s part and when they say “Search in PDFs” what they really mean is “make non-searchable PDFs searchable”, in which case there are no changes.
Or it could be a bug and indexing PDFs on the free plan is on borrowed time.
Which Plan Is Right For You?
I’ve long said that if you are planning to use Evernote for going paperless, you’ll want to subscribe to the Premium plan. My reasoning for this was purely based on upload limits – if you’re uploading a lot of documents, you’ll hit 60MB quickly.
Depending on what happens with PDF searching, you may have a new option – the Plus plan. It just depends how you’ll use the service.
Do any of these plans impact you? Will you be changing your Evernote tier? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
