One of my favorite companies is trying to dump me, and I get it. I’ve been using Evernote for over 10 years, and suddenly they really, really want me to upgrade, or leave. Every time I open the app, I get a full-screen pop-up like this:

Part of me does feel jilted … at ~20 years old, this company is one of the longest-running freemium consumer businesses on the internet. Now, the constant bombardment with upgrade pop-ups feels a bit like they’re punishing their free users for opting into that model.

But, I won’t listen to that part of me, because I understand what the company is dealing with. Evernote supports over 200 million users (!), with the vast majority on the free version. The company has weathered 2008, COVID, the latest tech bubble burst, and everything in between. Not to mention thousands of competitors with VC dollars to burn. In the meantime, the product has gotten better every single year, and I have consistently loved it.

Reading the announcement that preceded this upgrade campaign, I wasn’t surprised to learn that I use much more data and more functionality than the typical free user. This is why I’m part of the annoy-till-they-buy-or-quit cohort. And I have to give the Evernote team credit: six months into this, and it’s still just barely below the pain threshold that would have made me either upgrade or leave by now. They could have made it much less tolerable than a pop-up, or straight up forced me to upgrade or lose my data. Instead, I’ve been allowed to keep using the app, even though I’m way over the newly defined free tier. To their further credit, they understood they’d definitely lose some users doing this. They were honest about that in the blog, and they remain committed to users’ data ownership and data portability.

Like all software companies, Evernote is operating in a much tougher economic environment, and they could no longer support so many free users and so much free data. I’ve enjoyed almost 11 years of usage and improvements, at no cost. For all that time, Evernote worked hard to build the best app they could, and erred on the side of giving free users too much value, not too little. Now it’s time for me either to give back some of that value, or upgrade. I will probably upgrade … eventually.