The First F-Grade Teardown: Evernote Under Bending Spoons

A RetentionCheck churn teardown of Evernote

Methodology: 50+ public complaints from Evernote's own User Forum threads (especially the Bending Spoons price-increase thread and the post-acquisition support-quality thread), Follow the Money's investigative coverage of the Bending Spoons acquire-extract pattern, MPU Talk community discussion, Hacker News acquisition thread, and Medium migration guides. Analyzed with RetentionCheck.

This is the first F-grade teardown in this series. Every prior analysis (Notion, Linear, Figma, Asana, Monday.com, Cursor) scored D or above. Evernote broke the floor.

The Churn Health Score

Evernote scored 24/100, grade F. Two critical drivers, two high, two medium.

The story is not about gradual product drift. It is about ownership discontinuity. Bending Spoons acquired Evernote in November 2023 and has since executed a playbook Follow the Money documented as a replicable extraction pattern: "a massive round of redundancies, followed by a price increase and radical changes to the way the app works, which allows the company to significantly boost its profits immediately after purchase."

The 5 churn patterns

1. Price doubling without proportional value (critical, 94% confidence)

Annual personal plan jumped from $69.99 to $129.99, an approximately 86% increase. Pro plan to $169.99. Some users reported 80%+ individual hikes. The Evernote User Forum thread "Bending Spoons Price Increases Begin" remains one of the most-viewed threads on the company's own forum.

Follow the Money summarized the response: the pricing increase "was often met with resistance from loyal and longstanding users."

Users did not dispute that Bending Spoons could raise prices. They disputed the unilateral doubling of prices they had been paying since 2016.

2. Free tier slashed to 50 notes total (critical, 92%)

Post-acquisition, the free tier was reduced to 50 notes total. Not 50 notes per month. 50 notes in absolute total. Any existing free user with a multi-year note archive was suddenly capped. New users hit the wall at 51 notes.

Meanwhile Obsidian (100% free for personal use with all features, themes, plugins, APIs, and community support) and Joplin (free, open-source with optional paid sync) became immediate credible alternatives.

On Reddit's r/Evernote, posts about alternatives and data export rank as the most upvoted content. Medium guides titled "Joining the Evernote Exodus" normalized leaving as the default action.

3. Mass layoffs crippled support (high, 86%)

Bending Spoons laid off approximately 250 Evernote employees in the US and Chile by mid-2023, per Follow the Money's coverage. Support quality degraded measurably.

The Evernote User Forum thread title captured the sentiment:

"Bending Spoons, which can barely even support paying Evernote customers right now, just announced another major acquisition."

When paying customers cannot get support and the parent company keeps buying new properties, the signal is unambiguous.

4. Bending Spoons "acquire-extract" pattern is public now (high, 83%)

This is the most durable churn driver. Follow the Money's investigative coverage documented Bending Spoons' playbook across multiple acquisitions: Meetup, WeTransfer, Evernote, and others. Same trajectory each time: redundancies, price increase, feature cuts, profit lift.

Every Evernote user now knows the playbook. Every new Bending Spoons acquisition announcement triggers defensive evaluation. The pattern is publicly documented, which means the trust damage is cumulative, not company-by-company.

5. Feature removals without notice (medium, 71%)

Multiple forum threads document features that disappeared or were moved to higher tiers post-acquisition. Users report feature removal without advance notice, which amplifies the trust damage.

What Evernote does right (historically)

Evernote was the category-defining note-taking tool. The core search capability, note organization system, OCR on attached images, and cross-device sync made it the dominant knowledge tool for the 2010s decade. Users who remain do so because the switching cost on a multi-year note archive is genuinely high.

The product that users bought in 2019 is not the product they pay for in 2026. That is the distinctive element of this teardown.

3 things Evernote could fix

1. Rebuild the free tier to at least 500 notes. Feature-limit, not content-limit. The free-tier slash is the single biggest driver of the exodus.
2. Publish a 36-month pricing stability commitment. Grandfather existing customers at current rates through 2029. Rebuild long-term trust.
3. Fund support to pre-layoff levels. Published SLA. Acknowledge the gap publicly. Fix the thing users cannot work around.

What this means for your SaaS

The Evernote story is not about the product. It is about the ownership change. Every SaaS acquisition is a trust transaction. If the playbook is layoffs and price increases, users will notice. The playbook is now documented enough that new acquisitions by known extractors trigger defensive migration immediately.

For founders considering selling to an acquirer: your users will know within 90 days which playbook the new owner uses. There is no hiding extraction patterns in the modern review ecosystem.

If you have cancellation feedback sitting in a spreadsheet, run it through RetentionCheck in 30 seconds. The pattern is usually underneath the individual reasons.

Key takeaways

• Ownership discontinuity is its own churn driver, separate from product or pricing drift.
• Doubling prices without proportional value compounds trust damage. It rarely stops.
• Slashing the free tier drives users to credible free alternatives in the same category (Obsidian, Joplin) faster than any other pricing move.
• Layoffs visible in support quality are a leading indicator that users read accurately.
• Extraction playbooks, once documented in public, damage every future acquisition the same company makes.

Sources

• Follow the Money: WeTransfer owner (Bending Spoons) acquire-extract pattern
• Evernote User Forum: Bending Spoons Price Increases Begin
• Evernote User Forum: Can barely support paying customers
• HN: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
• Sifted: Bending Spoons business model analysis
• Medium: Joining the Evernote Exodus (Obsidian migration guide)

Related teardowns

• Asana + Notion: Both Graded F (Grade F) · 15 Trustpilot reviews, billing trust collapse
• Notion's Mid-Life Crisis (Grade D) · 60+ HN complaints, feature bloat
• Why Teams Are Leaving Linear (Grade B) · Narrow, bounded churn (the opposite story)
• Figma's 2025 Pricing Hike (Grade C) · +33% + Penpot surge

Brian Farello is the founder of RetentionCheck, an AI-powered churn analysis tool for SaaS teams. Try it free at retentioncheck.com/try. Other teardowns: Notion (D), Linear (B), Figma (C), Asana (D), Monday.com (C), Cursor (D).