From cheap tool to premium subscription: When a beloved app's price skyrockets

Huge price hikes force loyal users to reconsider their favorite apps.

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 really value 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."