I’ve been wondering for a while now which freemium cloud app would be the first one to nudge me from the free to premium version. I’m pleased to say that Evernote has earned that honor. Why?
The free version wasn’t crippled
In fact, far from it. I got to see and play with every key Evernote feature in the free version of the client application.
They Offer a Free iPhone App that is Well Integrated with the Service
The iPhone app they have makes total sense, is lightweight, and makes the most common features easy to use. The main screen prompts me with four different options to collect notes and four tabs across the bottom that give access to existing notes and options.
One of the greatest features in the application is the ability to do a text search of picture-notes. Within a couple of minutes of capturing a photo in Evernote, I can do a search for text that was in the photo (and it comes back highlighted too). That’s in the free version. The premium service adds the same text searching in PDF files I attach to notes, as well as priority recognition of my images.
The free version caps the monthly upload bandwidth at 40MB, which I’ve seen as a very reasonable (even lofty) quota. However, as I’ve used the iPhone app more and more, I’ve been running awfully low on available space. The premium version bumps that over 12X to 500MB per month.
The Pricing Model Makes Sense
Not a whole lot to say here, it’s a reasonable $5/month for the service. Tell you what though, it’s an easy decision to sign up for the annual service since it nets a generous 25% discount. I debated trying the month-to-month for a while first…but that wasn’t necessary with that kind of an incentive available.
Where can Evernote Improve?
Things aren’t perfect yet. It’s definitely a growing venture, which can be seen in the large improvements in each new release of the client software. Things have been rocky at times, especially during synchronization, when trying to capture or recall notes.
All that said, I’m quite pleased so far. Next, I should detail how I’m using the app, but that’ll have to wait for a while 🙂