My last six months at Evernote(alexkras.com) |
My last six months at Evernote(alexkras.com) |
Well, just yesterday the WSJ published an article [1] about bending spoons that include this detail:
> Evernote, a note-taking app acquired in 2023, was among the holdings Bending Spoons profiled in its IPO prospectus. Evernote’s revenue was 30% higher in 2025 than in 2022, and during that time average revenue per monthly active user rose 150%. What the prospectus didn’t say: Those figures meant the number of users fell 48%. Revenue rose through price increases as the customer base shrank.
So, a lot of users were not willing to pay.
1. https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/at-bending-spoons-the-...
It's basically the broadcom model for VMware. Sadly this model is very popular these days.
I'm very happy with obsidian these days though I don't use their sync service. The self hosted livesync is pretty good though a bit quirky at times.
Evernote was...fine, but the UX was very stilted. Text placement was very restrictive, and the spontaneous nature of taking notes was suppressed by it generally forcing you to type linearly as if it were a Word document.
I used it for the ability to seamlessly sync between devices, but once OneNote 2013 hit, I dropped Evernote like a rock in a lake. It had no competitive drive in terms of functionality once MS wiped the floor with them.
My current generic note-taker is SimpleNote. It is Multiplatform, it syncs, and it's free. It does 1/20th of what Evernote does but that didn't matter.
Stepan Pachikov is so great guy, I listened a lot of his talks. I am sad to live without his software, without screenshot editing software having red arrows of some specific form and without the search which worked really well. Good-bye yet another greedy corporation.
I currently host my personal Web site as static files via AWS CloudFront. But even static hosting on a $5 VPS with Nginx might handle an HN surge fine.
I host my AI-generated code portfolio site separately (to unambiguously distinguish it from my 100% human-written open source work), using github.io (seemed appropriate) with a custom domain.
I don't think folks think clearly about how their setup scales computationally when they are choosing their stack. I've been writing a lot of software designed for drop-dead simple self-hosting lately (can run CGI-bin or as a standalone server, based on the env it's invoked in), and I put my own instances behind CGI, keenly aware of the risk on the open internet. But I design .htaccess so that the main server is hitting caches for anything anonymous. This works Just Fine for hitting the HN front page in my experience on a 1GB VPS, since the request never even makes it to my Python code.
I think folks just don't prioritize these sorts of optimizations.
It’s just accelerated my exit plan.
I expect the same is true of Airtable.
At the end, it was so bloated that there was a slight lag in the editor which made it infuriating to type on it. Switched and never looked back.
For even more contrast with Evernote: the fantastic Obsidian application lists eight employees and one cat on their about page:
I loved Evernote, it plus David Allen GTD changed my work life for the better.
But the bloat kept bloating endlessly. I filled in Evernote's surveys, I offered to double my payment for an Evernote Classic with just the feature set of 2012 or so. No teams, no chat, definitely no AI. Just my notes on every device, searchable and silently synced.
a) "dead"? i guess its horn got sawed off and now it is a plain old horse.
b) i had forgotten evernote had notifications (it probably still does! i presume i turned them off around 2009 and the setting has stuck). i presume it's literally only feature release announcements and MAU-farming zero-party ads (aka feature existence proclamations), what else COULD it be?
My personal site is hosted on this exact setup. Twice I made the homepage, twice I noticed no slowdown whatsoever.
The only problem is that in May of this year, when my SimCity 3k in 4k article was found by the HN crowd, its access.log bloated to 200Mb causing my logrotate script (that hooks in Goaccess) to blow up every time since when trying to process it, and this log has been growing every day since - because logrotate isn't doing much rotating!
When I can massage my VPS into processing it, I'll have the stats to enjoy.
If a blog needs "scaling" of any sort you are doing it wrong.
The "If necessary I can add autoscaling later" mindset is what leads to bloated, slow websites.