What Bending Spoons did to Evernote: a timeline, with data

On July 1, 2026, an Italian software company most people have never heard of listed on the Nasdaq at an $18.4 billion valuation and closed its first day up about 40%. Bending Spoons owns Evernote. It also owns Vimeo, WeTransfer, Meetup, Eventbrite and AOL, and it has told investors it has identified more than a thousand more companies it would like to buy.

If you have used Evernote for a decade and have spent the last three years wondering what exactly happened to it, that sentence is the answer. What happened to Evernote was not neglect or incompetence. It was a strategy, it was executed deliberately, and it just went public.

This is the timeline, with dates and sources. Then we look at what Evernote users are actually saying right now — not anecdotally, but by pulling the 500 most recent App Store reviews and counting them. The result surprised us, and it is the most useful thing in this post.

The short version

• Bending Spoons announced the Evernote acquisition on November 16, 2022 and closed it in January 2023.
• It laid off 129 people on February 17, 2023, then closed the US and Chile offices in July 2023 and moved the product to Europe.
• The free plan was cut to 50 notes and one notebook on December 4, 2023.
• In November 2025 Personal and Professional were retired for Starter ($99/yr, capped at 1,000 notes) and Advanced ($249.99/yr).
• Bending Spoons’ revenue went from $387 million in 2023 to $1.31 billion in 2025. The Evernote playbook worked, financially.
• The engineering complaints have largely stopped. In 230 negative reviews we read, only 4% mention a bug, crash, sync failure or slowdown. 57% are about price, upsell pressure, or AI.

That last point is the one worth sitting with, and we will come back to it.

Who Bending Spoons actually is

Bending Spoons is a Milan-based software company whose business is buying well-known consumer apps that have stopped growing, cutting their costs hard, raising their prices, and running them for profit. It does not sell the brands afterwards — it keeps them.

The portfolio it has assembled is genuinely striking: Evernote (2023), Meetup and StreamYard (2024), Issuu and WeTransfer (2024), Brightcove for $233 million (2024), Komoot, Vimeo for $1.38 billion, and AOL (2025), and Eventbrite for $500 million (announced late 2025). Revenue grew from $387 million in 2023 to $1.31 billion in 2025.

The staffing pattern is consistent enough to be called a method. TechCrunch, reading the IPO filings, reported that Bending Spoons took on roughly 1,830 full-time employees through the AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo deals alone and expects only a few hundred to remain once its transformations are complete.

Evernote was the acquisition where that method was first run at scale on a product people loved. Understanding that is the whole point of the timeline below: nothing that happened to Evernote was specific to Evernote.

The full timeline

November 16, 2022 — the acquisition is announced. Evernote, once valued at over $1 billion and one of the defining apps of the smartphone era, is being sold to a Milan-based app developer that most of its users had never heard of.

January 2023 — the deal closes.

February 17, 2023 — 129 employees are laid off. The cuts hit product design, engineering, HR, sales, customer service and marketing. Bending Spoons’ statement to TechCrunch: “This was a difficult — yet necessary — decision as we pursue our ambitious plans for Evernote. The company has been unprofitable for years and the situation was unsustainable in the long term.”

That statement is worth taking at face value. Evernote genuinely was losing money for years before the sale. Everything that follows is what “fixing” that looked like.

May–August 2023 — the engineering rebuild. This part rarely makes the summaries, and it should. Evernote’s own engineering blog documents replacing the note-syncing system with a CRDT-based one built on Yjs, rewriting the navigation layer (desktop and web in version 10.59, mobile in 10.52), splitting the old monolith’s application and database layers, and moving from Puppet-managed servers to containers. This was real work on real technical debt.

July 7, 2023 — the US and Chile offices close. The remaining engineering and IT staff are let go and the product is centralized in Europe. CEO Luca Ferrari cites the “significant boost in operational efficiency that will come as a consequence of centralizing operations in Europe.” Departing staff receive 16 weeks of salary, a prorated bonus, up to a year of health insurance, and visa support — a better severance than most tech layoffs of that period, and worth saying.

December 4, 2023 — the free plan effectively ends. Free accounts are capped at 50 notes and one notebook. Evernote’s own wording: “Going forward, new and existing Free users will have a maximum of fifty notes and one notebook per account,” with the suggestion that users “can always delete unwanted content to remain below the threshold.”

Fifty notes is not a free tier. It is a demo. The decade-long on-ramp that made Evernote a habit for millions of people was switched off in a single announcement.

November 2025 — the repricing. Personal and Professional are discontinued. In their place: Starter at $14.99/month or $99/year, and Advanced at $24.99/month or $249.99/year. Starter holds 1,000 notes, 20 notebooks and 3 devices. Advanced is uncapped.

The 1,000-note ceiling on Starter is the part that matters. Anyone who has used Evernote seriously for ten years is well past 1,000 notes, which means the $99 plan does not actually exist for them. The real choice is $249.99 a year or leave. We traced every Evernote price change back to 2016 in a separate post — the top consumer tier is up roughly 3.6× in a decade.

July 1, 2026 — Bending Spoons goes public. The IPO prices at $29 a share, above the marketed $26–28 range, raising $1.68 billion at an $18.4 billion valuation. The stock closes its first day up about 40%, near $25.7 billion. The company tells investors it has identified more than a thousand further acquisition targets representing roughly $400 billion in combined annual revenue.

What Evernote users are actually complaining about

Everyone has a theory about why Evernote users are unhappy. We wanted to count instead of guess.

On August 19, 2026 we pulled the 500 most recent written reviews of Evernote on the US App Store — every review Apple’s public review feed returned, spanning February 12 to August 17, 2026. Then we read the negative ones and categorised them. This is a snapshot of one store in one country, and written reviews skew toward people with something to say. It is not a survey. But it is 500 real reviews, and nobody else appears to have counted them.

The rating distribution is not mediocre. It is a war.

The average of those 500 reviews is 3.04 stars. The lifetime average Apple displays on the App Store listing is 4.41 stars across 77,126 ratings. Almost nobody lands in the middle: 80% of recent reviewers gave either one star or five. Evernote in 2026 is an app that a large group of people still genuinely love and a similarly large group actively resents.

And here is the part we did not expect. Of the 230 reviews rating one or two stars:

• 33% mention price or cost. By far the largest category.
• 23% mention ads, pop-ups, nagging or upsell prompts. This one we genuinely did not anticipate at this volume. Users describe full-screen takeovers they cannot dismiss, and prompts to upgrade appearing while they are mid-task.
• 10% object to AI features being pushed at them — not to AI existing, but to it being the thing the product now leads with.
• 13% say outright that they are leaving or have left.
• Only 4% mention any technical fault at all — a bug, crash, sync failure, data loss, or the app being slow.

Taken together, 57% of negative reviews are about price, upsell pressure, or AI. 4% are about the software not working.

That is a remarkable result, and it cuts both ways. It means the “Bending Spoons broke Evernote” story that circulates on Reddit and Hacker News is, on this evidence, mostly wrong. Whatever else people are angry about, they are almost never angry about the app failing to work — in a corpus of 230 one- and two-star reviews, exactly ten mentioned a fault of any kind. For a note-taking app carrying twenty years of legacy, that is a good number, and it is consistent with the 2023 engineering rebuild having done its job.

What they broke was the deal. Users are not saying the app is bad. They are saying it costs too much, asks too often, and no longer feels like it is on their side.

What Bending Spoons got right

A teardown that only lists grievances is not worth reading, so here is the honest other column.

They fixed real engineering problems. The CRDT-based sync rewrite, the navigation rewrite and the infrastructure migration were substantial pieces of work that Evernote had deferred for years, and our review data suggests they landed. They took an unprofitable company and made it profitable, which is the thing everyone says they want software companies to do. Their layoff severance was better than the industry norm. And they have not done the thing that usually follows this kind of acquisition — they have not shut Evernote down, sold it on, or let it rot. It is actively developed.

If you are happy paying $249.99 a year, Evernote in 2026 is a better-engineered product than Evernote in 2022. That is a real sentence and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

So is Evernote dying?

No — and that is the wrong question.

Evernote is not dying. It is being converted. It has moved from a product that grew by being generous to newcomers into a product that earns by charging its remaining committed users more. That is a coherent business, it is currently a successful one, and it will probably keep working for years.

The question that actually matters to you is narrower: are you the customer this new Evernote is designed for? If you have thousands of notes, do not want AI features leading your note-taking app, and are looking at $249.99 a year, the honest answer is probably no. Not because the app got worse, but because the deal changed and you were not the one who changed it.

And it is worth being clear-eyed about direction. A company that just raised $1.68 billion and told the market it wants to buy a thousand more businesses is not going to become gentler about monetisation. The pressure that produced the 50-note free tier and the 1,000-note Starter plan is now a public company’s quarterly obligation.

If you are thinking about leaving

Two things, in this order.

Get your notes out, whether or not you leave. Exporting is free, it takes an evening, and having your own copy is sensible regardless of what you decide. Our complete guide to exporting Evernote notes covers the desktop-only requirement, the silent 100-note limit and how to get past it, and — importantly — what ENEX quietly does not carry.

Do not delete anything until the copy is verified. Export, import wherever you are going, open your five most complicated notes, and only then think about cancelling. Evernote’s refund window is 60 days from the payment date for annual individual plans, so if a renewal has just hit you, you may have more room than you think.

Where Harbor fits, honestly

We make Harbor, so treat this section accordingly.

Harbor exists partly because of the story above. We think the thing that went wrong at Evernote was not technical — it was that the price and the terms moved underneath people who had already committed a decade of their notes. So we published a written price promise: what you pay does not go up while you keep your subscription. Not a policy we can quietly revise in a help-centre article, but a public commitment. No competitor we know of has one, which is either an advantage or a warning depending on your view of us.

We also built the import first rather than last. Importing an Evernote ENEX file into Harbor is a drag-and-drop, and we timed and screenshotted a full migration rather than asserting it works — including an honest account of the things ENEX does not carry, which no importer on the market can fix.

If you want the direct comparison instead, we keep an Evernote alternative page with the feature and price table laid out side by side, and a page of what other people are saying about Evernote in their own public words.

Harbor is not the only reasonable answer. Obsidian, UpNote, Joplin, Apple Notes and Notesnook are all real options with real trade-offs, and we would rather you land somewhere that fits than land on us and regret it.

Sources and method

The review analysis used Apple’s public customer-review feed for Evernote (App Store ID 281796108), US storefront, sorted most-recent, pulled on August 19, 2026. It returned 500 written reviews dated February 12 to August 17, 2026, all with unique IDs. We categorised the 230 reviews rated one or two stars by keyword match across the review title and body; a review mentioning more than one theme is counted in each, so the categories do not sum to 100%. Lifetime App Store figures are from Apple’s public app lookup endpoint the same day; the Google Play figure was read from the Play Store listing on August 19, 2026. Written reviews are a self-selecting sample and this covers one storefront in one country — we would not present it as representative of all Evernote users, only as a count of what recent US reviewers chose to write about.

The timeline draws on TechCrunch’s report of the February 2023 layoffs, which carries the 129 figure and the “unprofitable for years” statement; SiliconANGLE’s coverage of the July 2023 office closures and Luca Ferrari’s comments; TechCrunch’s report that the 50-note free plan took effect December 4, 2023; Evernote’s own engineering post Future-proofing Evernote’s foundations, dated August 21, 2023, for the CRDT/Yjs sync rewrite, the navigation rewrite and the infrastructure migration; and TechCrunch’s IPO explainer for the acquisition list, the revenue figures and the headcount expectations. Current Evernote pricing was read from evernote.com/compare-plans and is tracked in our price history post.

Last verified: August 19, 2026. If anything here is out of date or wrong, tell us at hello@harbor.my and we will correct it and re-date this line.