Evernote price hikes show how Bending Spoons monetizes loyalty

Evernote's parent company, Bending Spoons, raised the note-taking app's top subscription tier from $130 a year to $250 for some users this year, part of a pattern of steep price increases hitting long-running consumer software, according to Ars Technica. The new top-tier price is more than 3.3 times what Evernote's most advanced plan cost in 2023 and roughly 10 times the annual rate the company charged from its 2008 launch through 2016, Ars Technica reports.

What exactly changed in Evernote's pricing structure?

Bending Spoons, which acquired Evernote in 2023, restructured the app's subscription tiers this year, pushing some long-time subscribers from $130 annually to $250 annually, per Ars Technica's reporting. The mechanism is straightforward: existing tiers were reorganized so that features previously bundled into a mid-level plan now require the top tier, raising the effective price for users who want to keep the same functionality.

Evernote is not alone. Ars Technica notes that a lifetime Plex pass, which sold for $75 in 2012, now costs $250. Individual plans for Quicken, Robokiller, and Inkdrop have each doubled in price in recent years, the outlet reports.

Why is Bending Spoons raising prices now?

The company's own account, filed with U.S. regulators, points to subscriber loyalty rather than financial distress as the rationale. In a June SEC filing cited by Ars Technica, Bending Spoons said it was drawn to Evernote's 200 million accounts and its retention patterns: "We… valued its robust subscriber retention, driven by a rich feature set and a highly engaged and tenured customer base." The filing adds that "many customers had thousands of notes stored in Evernote and had developed personalized workflows on and around the product," and that the average customer tenure at the time of acquisition was 7.2 years, according to Ars Technica.

That combination — years of accumulated data and workflows a user would have to rebuild elsewhere — is what gives a legacy app pricing power over its existing base, independent of whether it is attracting new customers.

Was Evernote losing users before the price hikes?

No, according to the metrics Bending Spoons disclosed. New user registrations at Evernote had been shrinking for years before the acquisition — down 23 percent year-over-year in 2021, down 23 percent in 2022, and down 20 percent in 2023, the filing states, as reported by Ars Technica. After Bending Spoons took over, new registrations grew 29 percent in 2024 and 20 percent in 2025.

That reversal undercuts the common assumption that subscription price increases are typically a response to slowing growth, a dynamic frequently cited around streaming-service price hikes, Ars Technica notes. Evernote's new registrations were already recovering by the time the steepest tier changes took effect, suggesting the pricing decision was not primarily about plugging a growth shortfall.

Did Bending Spoons test how much users would tolerate?

According to Ars Technica's review of the filing, Bending Spoons experimented with pricing and tier structures between 2023 and 2025 to gauge the limits of what Evernote's base would accept before significant numbers of subscribers canceled. The filing frames this as a deliberate, iterative process rather than a single abrupt hike — raising prices, watching cancellation and retention data, and adjusting before the next round.

What should subscribers of legacy apps watch for next?

The Evernote case offers a template that owners of other long-running consumer software may follow when a product has high switching costs — years of stored data, custom workflows, or integrations that make leaving expensive in time rather than money.

What to watch:

• Tier reshuffling disguised as feature upgrades. Watch for features moving from a cheaper tier into a pricier one rather than a flat price increase, which is harder to notice at renewal.
• Filings and investor disclosures. Private equity–style acquirers of software companies often detail retention and pricing strategy in SEC filings tied to debt or equity offerings, as Bending Spoons did.
• Export tools before they're needed. Users of Plex, Quicken, Inkdrop, or similar long-tenure apps may want to confirm data-export options now rather than after a renewal notice arrives.
• New-user growth as a signal. A company raising prices while new signups are already recovering, as in Evernote's case, suggests the hike is about extracting more from existing users rather than offsetting a shrinking customer base.

Ars Technica's reporting does not identify similar SEC disclosures for Plex, Quicken, Robokiller, or Inkdrop explaining the rationale behind those companies' price increases.