How much are you willing to pay to keep using your favorite app?
Maybe you’ve used it for years. Perhaps it performs a function so essential and specific that you couldn’t imagine what you’d do without it. But when the developer announces an extraordinary price hike, you’re forced to consider how much you reallyvalue that app.
Earlier this year, 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, for example, was $75 in 2012. Today, it’s $250. Individual plans for Quicken, Robokiller, and Inkdrop have each doubled in price.
It’s easy to assume that the developers are miscalculating the value of their app or the loyalty of their users. But an unconventionally honest assessment regarding price hikes from Evernote owner Bending Spoons illustrates how owners of legacy software can apply pressure to loyal customers to extract additional revenue.
Evernote puts a fresh squeeze on old customers
When Bending Spoons bought Evernote in 2023, the app had a sizable customer base. In a June SEC filing, Bending Spoons explained that it was attracted to Evernote’s 200 million accounts and high user engagement.
“We… valued its robust subscriber retention, driven by a rich feature set and a highly engaged and tenured customer base,” the filing says. “Many customers had thousands of notes stored in Evernote and had developed personalized workflows on and around the product. At the time of acquisition, the average customer tenure was 7.2 years.”
The price hikes weren’t evidence of Bending Spoon undervaluing Evernote’s users but rather of the company seeing an opportunity to turn that loyalty into more revenue.
According to Bending Spoons, “year-over-year growth in new user registrations had been negative for several years” at -23 percent in 2021, -23 percent in 2022, and -20 percent in 2023. After the 2023 acquisition, “new user registrations increased by 29 percent in 2024 and 20 percent in 2025,” the filing says. This suggests that slower-than-desired growth,which is often associated with streaming price hikes, wasn’t to blame for Evernote’s higher prices.
Although price hikes risk eroding customer loyalty, Bending Spoons investigated how much change in pricing and subscription tiers Evernote users would tolerate.
From 2023 through 2025, we leveraged our proprietary technologies to launch more than 200 experiments across a range of areas, including evaluating the impact of new features on retention, testing alternative price points, and iterating on the user experience at onboarding.
Shortly after the acquisition, Evernote prices increased (from $8 per month to $15/month, or from $70/year to $130/year). The new prices aimed to better align “with how different customer segments… engage with” Evernote, and, in combination with product improvements, led to “average revenue per monthly active user being 2.5 times as high in 2025 as in 2022,” Bending Spoons said.
Bending Spoons also made some previously paywalled Evernote features available to non-paying users and added usage limits to certain features. After this change, “subscription conversions triggered by reaching a usage limit increased in 2024 to approximately twice their level in 2022,” and “in 2025, such usage limits accounted for 51 percent of all conversions,”
Additionally, Evernote released over 150 product updates in 2025, the filing says. Evernote v11, a huge update, came out in 2026.
While issuing layoffs in July 2023, Bending Spoons said Evernote had been “unprofitable for years.” By November 2024, the app had reportedly reached record levels of profitability.
This year’s Evernote price bump followed years of experimenting with pricing structures and adding new features. The price hikes were not the result of Evernote undervaluing longtime customers. Instead, Evernote’s owner saw that loyal customer base as an opportunity to generate even more revenue through carefully calibrated changes to pricing, feature access, and capabilities.
Inkdrop focuses on established users
Comments from Inkdrop’s developer also help explain steep price hikes imposed on longtime app users.
In 2024, the Markdown note-taking app’s price doubled from $5/month to $10/month or $50/year to $100/year. At the time, Inkdrop’s creator, Takuya Matsuyama, wrote a blog post explaining the app’s first price change in seven years:
Maintaining a smaller scale allows me to keep focusing on what really matters.
I’d prefer to have a few thousand customers who really like my app rather than >10k broader customers.
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.
While Evernote sought to combat negative new registrations after its acquisition, Inkdrop’s developer was less concerned about growing its customer base and more interested in extracting additional revenue from current users. Both apps have customer bases filled with users who have subscribed for over five years, which makes finding new customers challenging.
Rewarding loyal users
Mature apps with longtime subscribers, initially drawn in through low prices and reliable features, face a predicament. Those loyal users are good for business, but they’re often content with software that functions as it always has—and don’t expect to pay more for it.
But stagnant growth doesn’t mix well with inflation or stockholder expectations. It can also leave companies without enough revenue to develop new features and keep software up to date. Sometimes, the prices apps launch with aren’t sustainable in the long term, as Plex has said about its lifetime pass, which has seen its price increase by 525 percent over two price hikes since March 2024. We’ve seen a similar pattern with streaming apps.
New features can help soften the blow of massive price hikes. But it’s still hard for old customers to accept prices that double, or go even higher, especially if they were happy with the app as it was.
Developers have options for covering rising costs and funding new features beyond price hikes. For example, they could reward longtime customers with grandfathered pricing, exclusive features, or other perks to help offset higher costs. And when price hikes are unavoidable, giving customers advance warning can go a long way toward showing loyal users they’re valued.
Another option is to offer more subscription tiers in general. Developers often cite new features to justify higher subscription prices, but not all users want those features. A wider range of subscription options, including a cheaper, AI-free tier, could let developers expand an app’s features and audience without penalizing users who are happy with its original functionality. Alternatively, developers could offer advanced features to power users as individual or bundled add-ons.
Sometimes, various internal and external factors make higher prices inevitable. When that happens, users would be wise to reexamine whether that beloved app is still the best option after all these years.
Scharon HardingSenior Technology Reporter
Scharon HardingSenior Technology Reporter
Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She’s been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.
Source: arstechnica.com
