Huge price hikes force loyal users to reconsider their favorite apps. Evernote, a note-taking app, changed its subscription tiers, forcing some users to go from paying $130 per year to $250. The highest tier now costs more than 3.3 times as much as the most advanced tier did in 2023 and 10 times more than what Evernote charged for annual subscriptions from its 2008 launch until 2016.
That's just one example of many longstanding consumer pieces of software that have seen dramatic price hikes in recent years. A lifetime pass to Plex was $75 in 2012. Today, it's $250. Individual plans for Quicken, Robokiller, and Inkdrop have each doubled in price.
When Bending Spoons bought Evernote in 2023, the app had a sizable customer base with an average customer tenure of 7.2 years. The company valued its robust subscriber retention and high user engagement. After the acquisition, new user registrations increased by 29 percent in 2024 and 20 percent in 2025, suggesting the price hikes were part of a strategy to turn loyalty into more revenue.
According to Bending Spoons, average revenue per monthly active user being 2.5 times as high in 2025 as in 2022. The company leveraged proprietary technologies to launch over 200 experiments, testing alternative price points and iterating on user experience. Usage limits introduced in 2024-2025 accounted for 51 percent of all conversions in 2025.
Source: Ars Technica · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing