When Price Outpaces Value
16 years of using one product exclusively was undone in less than 18 months. Not because the product failed, but because the brand allowed price to outpace value. And this is the risk every price-focused product company faces in a hyper-connected social world.
Evernote was, to me, far more than a note-taking app; it functioned as my digital brain. A became not merely a tool, but a place where recall mattered more than organization and where trust in retrieval was everything. I was such a fanboy, I even applied to be one of their official product evangelists!
Like many users, I initially treated Evernote as a structured system. Folders. Subfolders. Hierarchies. A logic borrowed from operating systems and file cabinets. In data terms, it resembled a warehouse. Row. Aisle. Bin.
But that is not how human thinking works. We retrieve information through association, not coordinates.
After reading how publisher Michael Hyatt abandoned rigid structure in favor of metadata tags, I followed suit. I eliminated folders entirely and relied on tagging. Year. Topic. Content type. Evernote handled the rest. Full-text indexing. Image text recognition. PDF search. Timestamping.
What emerged was something closer to a data lake; unstructured input with intelligent retrieval. That system scaled to nearly 9,000 notes. It worked. Brilliantly.
So why leave? Because the brand broke trust.
After Bending Spoons acquired Evernote in 2022, pricing underwent what was framed as a “reset.” In practice, it meant dramatic price increases — in some cases two to six times prior costs — without commensurate increases in value.
User backlash was immediate and visible, particularly on platforms like Reddit. This was not accidental. The new owners calculated that customers had been under-monetized.
What this approach did, however, was convert loyalty into a liability.
Price became more important than value. Staying as a user became all about the transaction rather than a relationship with a transaction.
I call this the Jos. A. Bank effect, named after the men’s clothing store infamous for their ‘sales’ that happen every single week. Prices are inflated so that discounts can feel generous. Sales are the constant, so, eventually, credibility collapses.
After one of these massive price increases, I let my Evernote subscription lapse intentionally. Within weeks, deeply discounted offers arrived. The margin had always been there. Value was never the constraint. When a company can swing pricing that dramatically, customer experience is not the priority. Extraction of cash, not the creation of value, is the priority.
Customer experience does not live solely in the product. It lives in how the brand makes the customer feel. So I am migrating from Evernote to Notion, not because the features are superior, but because the value proposition is clear, the pricing is stable, and the communication is consistent. For my use case, the tools are functionally at parity. The difference is integrity.
The lesson is simple and repeatable:
Do not treat your most loyal users as a profit center to be optimized. Treat them as the foundation that makes profit possible.
Because once trust is gone, even your evangelists will leave.
