Evernote's new owner raised prices five months after the deal

A note archive changes hands

On 16 November 2022, Evernote announced it was joining Bending Spoons, an Italian company that acquires established apps to run long-term rather than sell them on. The post promised that “the Evernote you know and love will continue to thrive” and separately committed to keeping user data “safe and secure,” but it gave no detail on staffing, pricing or product direction beyond describing the deal as a way to accelerate Evernote's existing plans. The transaction was expected to close in early 2023; Bending Spoons's own site now dates completion to January 2023 and credits the acquisition with more than 200 subsequent feature releases and a claimed threefold sync-speed improvement, both stated as the company's own figures rather than independently measured results.

What followed: features, then a price rise

The clearest concrete change came just over five months after the acquisition closed. On 28 April 2023, Evernote announced higher prices across its Personal and Professional tiers, effective from 1 May for new subscribers and the end of that month for existing ones. The post's stated justification was that this was the first increase in close to seven years, during which the product had gained calendar integration, task management and AI features, and that higher prices would fund “infrastructure and product development.” That is a vendor's account of cause and effect: the acquisition and the price rise are adjacent in time and both are documented, but the announcement offers no independent evidence that the specific price chosen was necessary rather than simply available.

What an owner change means for years of notes

Nothing in either post describes data being at risk, and Bending Spoons's stated model is to invest in acquired products rather than run them down. But an acquisition is still a governance change: the people deciding on export formats, retention and price are no longer the ones a long-time user originally chose to trust with a decade of notebooks. A price rise five months after new ownership is not evidence of bad faith, but it is exactly the kind of change a note archive's original terms never promised would stay fixed.

• Does the acquiring company's public track record show it sustaining products, or consolidating and retiring them?
• What does the acquisition announcement actually commit to, versus what it merely expresses hope about?
• If a price rise follows, does the stated justification point to specific new costs or capabilities, or only to time elapsed?

An archive of years of notes is not portable in the way a subscription is; that switching cost is what makes an ownership change worth watching closely rather than treating as routine corporate news.