Evernote raised the price of its top subscription tier to $250 a year this year, nearly double what some longtime users had been paying, and it is far from the only aging app now charging loyal customers more.
The increase, reported by Ars Technica on Tuesday, means Evernote’s most expensive plan now costs 3.3 times what its most advanced tier did in 2023 and 10 times what the app charged for annual subscriptions from its 2008 launch until 2016. Plex’s lifetime pass, $75 in 2012, now runs $250. Individual plans for Quicken, Robokiller and the Markdown note-taking app Inkdrop have each doubled in price.
The Evernote hikes came with an unusually candid explanation. In a June filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bending Spoons, the company that bought Evernote in 2023, said it had been drawn to the app’s 200 million accounts and its retention numbers. “Many customers had thousands of notes stored in Evernote and had developed personalized workflows on and around the product,” the filing said. “At the time of acquisition, the average customer tenure was 7.2 years.”
The problem, as Bending Spoons saw it, was never losing old customers but finding new ones. Registrations had fallen 23 percent in 2021, 23 percent in 2022 and 20 percent in 2023, the filing said. So the company ran more than 200 experiments from 2023 through 2025, “testing alternative price points” and adjusting what free users could do. It raised the standard price from $8 a month to $15, and from $70 a year to $130. Average revenue per monthly active user was 2.5 times as high in 2025 as in 2022.
The company also moved some features out from behind the paywall and set usage limits on others. After that, subscriptions triggered when a free user hit a limit roughly doubled from 2022 to 2024, the filing said, and such limits produced 51 percent of all new subscriptions in 2025.
Growth, for what it is worth, returned: registrations rose 29 percent in 2024 and 20 percent in 2025. Evernote shipped more than 150 product updates last year and a major version 11 this year. When Bending Spoons laid off staff in July 2023, it said the app had been “unprofitable for years”; by November 2024 it had reached record profitability.
Inkdrop’s developer was plainer still. Takuya Matsuyama doubled his note app’s price in 2024, from $5 a month to $10, its first increase in seven years. “I’d prefer to have a few thousand customers who really like my app rather than >10k broader customers,” he wrote in a blog post at the time. “Instead of spending my energy and money to pursue more and more users, I’d like to make the existing happy customers even happier by focusing on a specific niche, keeping things simple and clean.”
Mature apps face a bind, Scharon Harding wrote in Ars Technica. Customers drawn in by low launch prices seldom expect to pay more for software that already works, but those prices are not always sustainable — Plex has said as much about its lifetime pass, whose price has risen 525 percent in two increases since March 2024. Owners have options short of sticker shock: letting longtime subscribers keep their old rates, warning customers well before prices change, and offering more tiers, including a cheaper plan without the AI features many users never asked for.
When none of that happens, the article concludes, the cheapest thing a loyal user can do is the one thing app owners count on them not doing: shop around.