A new owner raised Evernote's subscription price

An acquisition, then a price rise

On 16 November 2022, Bending Spoons announced an agreement to acquire Evernote, then reporting roughly $100 million in recurring revenue and millions of paying customers, with completion expected in early 2023. Evernote's chief executive said the deal would bring extensive, accelerated improvements across the Teams, Professional, Personal and Free tiers, without naming a price. The price came later: on 28 April 2023, Evernote announced its first subscription increase in almost seven years, setting Personal at $14.99 a month or $129.99 a year and Professional at $17.99 a month or $169.99 a year, effective from 1 May for new subscribers and from the end of May for existing ones.

Who it affects, and how the timing worked

Existing Personal and Professional subscribers saw the new price apply at their next renewal from the end of May 2023, tied by the announcement to a roadmap of features including real-time multi-device editing, AI-assisted note cleanup and natural-language search. The pairing is the point: a price rise justified by a feature list is a different commitment from a price rise alone, and it is fair to ask later whether the listed features shipped.

The friction: a free plan that has kept tightening

Neither 2022 announcement fixed the free plan's limits, but Evernote's current plan comparison, as retrieved on 16 September 2026, shows a Free tier capped at 50 notes, one notebook, five spaces, 20 tags, 200 attachments, 1GB of storage and one connected device at a time, against a Starter plan allowing three devices. No single document opened for this piece dates exactly when each of those figures was set, which is itself worth noting: a living pricing page can tighten steadily without ever producing a dated announcement to point to. For a tool used to hold years of notes, a change of owner is a prompt to check both the subscription terms and the export options before the next renewal, since neither the acquisition announcement nor the pricing post commits to holding any of these limits steady.

• Can you export your full note history today, independent of your current plan tier?
• Does the one-device free-plan limit affect how you or any collaborators actually use the account?
• Which renewal date applies to you, and has the announced price already taken effect on it?

An ownership change does not itself set a price. It is the events that follow, dated where they can be, that show what actually changed for people already paying.