Evernote's new pricing, explained — and ten years of price increases

If you have had an Evernote subscription for a few years, the renewal email probably did not match your memory of what you signed up for. You are not misremembering.

In November 2025 Evernote retired the Personal and Professional plans and replaced them with two new ones, Starter and Advanced. The names changed, the prices changed, and — the part that gets missed — hard caps arrived on things that used to be uncapped.

We went back through a decade of Evernote’s pricing and sourced each change. Here is what happened, what it costs today, and what to do if the number on your renewal notice is not one you want to pay.

What Evernote costs today

We checked these on evernote.com on August 11, 2026. Prices are in US dollars.

Two things in that table are worth sitting with.

The first is that the free plan is now one device. Not two — one. If Evernote is on your laptop, it is not on your phone.

The second is that Starter has a 1,000-note ceiling. A paid plan with a note limit is new. If you have used Evernote seriously for a decade you are almost certainly past 1,000 notes already, which means the $99 tier is not actually available to you. Your real choice is $249.99 a year or leave.

Ten years of Evernote pricing, charted

This is the annual price of Evernote’s top consumer tier, from the June 2016 repricing to today. These are sticker prices, not adjusted for inflation.

One honest caveat about the middle of this chart. Evernote repackaged its tiers twice between 2016 and 2024, and the published prices from that stretch do not line up cleanly across sources — the Personal plan launched in 2021 somewhere around $7.50 a month and climbed from there, but we could not source a single authoritative annual figure for it that we would stand behind. So we have drawn the two ends solid and the middle dashed. The fact that a decade of prices is hard to chart is part of the story.

The top tier is up roughly 3.6× in ten years. The entry paid tier went from $34.99 to $99.00, about 2.8× — and unlike the old Plus plan, today’s Starter stops working at 1,000 notes.

The full timeline

June 2016 — the first big one. Evernote capped free Basic accounts at two devices and raised both paid tiers on the same day: Plus went to $3.99/month or $34.99/year, Premium to $7.99/month or $69.99/year. Users were given 30 days’ notice. This is the change that made “Evernote raised prices again” a recurring genre.

July 2021 — Personal and Professional. Evernote retired the old Plus and Premium names and repackaged around two tiers. Existing Premium subscribers were migrated to Personal at the price they were already paying, so a lot of long-time users did not feel this one immediately. Over time those grandfathered rates went away. Evernote’s own announcement post does not state a price, and third-party figures for this period disagree with each other, which is why this stretch is dashed on the chart above.

November 2022 — Bending Spoons buys Evernote. The Milan-based app company took over. We traced everything Bending Spoons has done to Evernote since — the layoffs, the free-tier collapse, the repricing, and the 2026 IPO — in a separate post.

February 2023 — 129 layoffs. Bending Spoons cut most of the staff and said publicly that Evernote had “been unprofitable for years” and that the situation “was unsustainable in the long term.” Everything after this point follows from that sentence.

November–December 2023 — the free plan collapses. Evernote first tested a 50-note free plan on under 1% of free users, then made it official: from December 4, 2023, free accounts were capped at 50 notes and one notebook. Existing users over the limit could still read, edit, delete and export — they just could not create anything new. Paid plans at the time were $14.99 and $17.99 a month.

2024 — Personal and Professional settle at $129.99 and $169.99 a year, or $14.99 and $17.99 a month. Those monthly figures are the ones Evernote itself was pushing free users toward in the 2023 coverage, which is what makes this pair the most reliable mid-decade data point we have.

November 2025 — Starter and Advanced. Personal and Professional were discontinued. Starter arrived at $99/year and Advanced at $249.99/year, and for the first time Evernote put hard caps on notes, notebooks, tags, devices, attachments and storage across the paid range.

The part that is not the price

It is easy to read this as a story about a number going up. The more useful read is that what you get for the number kept shrinking.

In 2016, paying Evernote bought you more upload allowance. Your notes were not counted. Your notebooks were not counted. Your tags were not counted. The free tier was a real, if limited, place to keep things.

In 2026, the free tier holds 50 notes on one device, and the $99 tier stops at 1,000 notes. The uncapped product is the $249.99 one. That is a different shape of business: the old model sold you capacity, the new one sells you permission.

This is also why the renewal shock lands so hard. People are not just paying more — they are being moved onto a plan that would not have held their library at any point in the last ten years.

If your renewal is coming up

A few practical things, in the order most people need them.

Check what you are actually on. Your plan and renewal date live in Account Settings on Evernote Web, under Billing. If you were grandfathered years ago, this is where you find out you no longer are.

You have 60 days to ask for a refund. Evernote’s published refund policy says that for an annual individual subscription it will process a refund if the request arrives within sixty days of the payment date. The request has to be in writing, has to identify your account, and has to ask for cancellation of that specific paid service — the refund and the cancellation are one request, not two.

There may also be a self-serve route: log into Account Settings on Evernote Web, choose Billing, click Need help? next to your billing history, and follow the modal. Evernote describes this as gradually rolling out, so it may not be there for you yet. If it is not, write to support instead and quote the charge date.

Export before you decide anything. Whatever you choose, get your notes out first so the decision is not made under pressure. Evernote’s export produces .enex files from the desktop app. Export in batches by notebook rather than all at once; large single exports fail more often than they succeed.

Then decide. If Evernote at $249.99 still does something you need, that is a perfectly reasonable answer. If it does not, you have a decade of alternatives that did not exist in 2016.

Where Harbor fits, honestly

We make Harbor, so treat this section with the scepticism it deserves.

Harbor is $9.99 a month or $99 a year — the same headline number as Evernote Starter, with no note cap, no notebook cap, no device cap. We also publish a written price promise: no increase for three years, then capped at 10% a year, in a dated public post we cannot quietly edit. We wrote that specifically because of the pattern above.

Importing is one step and keeps your notebooks, tags, attachments and dates — we wrote up how the ENEX import works if you want the detail before committing.

Where Evernote still wins: it has a far larger integrations ecosystem, a longer track record as a product, and built-in AI features that Harbor deliberately does not force on you. If those matter to you, stay. We would rather you make the right call than a fast one. If you are weighing it up, our Evernote alternative page lays out both sides, and what people actually complain about collects the recurring gripes — including the ones that apply to us. Our own pricing page has the full breakdown.

Sources

Pricing and plan limits for August 2026 were read directly from evernote.com/compare-plans on August 11, 2026. The June 2016 changes are reported by 9to5Mac and MacRumors, both dated June 2016, and corroborated by the Evernote pricing page as archived by the Wayback Machine in April 2016 and July 2016 — the April snapshot describes syncing “across all your devices” on Basic, the July one says “Sync across 2 devices.” The 2021 repackaging is announced on Evernote’s own blog, dated July 21, 2021 — that post states no prices, and we could not find an authoritative annual figure for Personal at launch, which is why the chart leaves that stretch dashed rather than guessing. The 60-day refund window is Evernote’s own refund policy. The 50-note free plan was reported by TechCrunch in November 2023 and confirmed by Engadget. The February 2023 layoffs and the “unprofitable for years” statement are from TechCrunch’s contemporaneous reporting.

Last verified: August 11, 2026. Evernote changes its pricing regularly — if you find something here out of date, tell us at hello@harbor.my and we will correct it and re-date this line.