What changed
Evernote’s highest annual subscription tier rose from $130 to $250, after Bending Spoons acquired the note-taking app in 2023. The company also changed feature access and added usage limits that can push users toward paid plans.
Bending Spoons said Evernote had 200 million accounts at acquisition, with customers staying an average of 7.2 years. Since then, average revenue per monthly active user has become 2.5 times higher than in 2022.
Why it matters
This is more than a routine subscription adjustment. Evernote’s pricing shows how valuable a mature app’s accumulated history can become: thousands of stored notes, established workflows and years of habit make switching costly even when the price changes sharply.
Bending Spoons disclosed that it ran more than 200 experiments from 2023 through 2025, including tests of price points, features and onboarding. Usage limits became a particularly effective lever. Subscription conversions triggered by hitting those limits approximately doubled in 2024.
The striking part is that the price increases arrived alongside stronger user acquisition. New registrations had fallen by 23 percent in both 2021 and 2022, then rose 29 percent in 2024 and 20 percent in 2025. That makes the strategy look less like a desperate response to a shrinking product and more like a deliberate attempt to extract more revenue from an established one.
The unresolved question is how much loyalty survives the squeeze. The latest increase’s effect on cancellations and retention has not been quantified, but Evernote’s model is now clear: long-term dependence is not only a reason to keep customers. It is also a pricing opportunity.
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