Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I am wondering if you’re a little bit pissed off at Evernote for changing the rules—I
mean changing their pricing plan.
I think that is exactly what we should explore today on DottoTech.
If you’re a long-time viewer of this channel, you know I post a lot about Evernote.
We have, in fact, a course on using Evernote so it’s a big part of our business.
So I notice everything that goes on in the Evernote world.
So of course, a change in pricing of Evernote is of paramount importance to me and to many
of you in my community.
So I thought we’d spend a few minutes and take a look at Evernote’s new pricing just
so that we can all understand exactly where we sit.
And I think the biggest change in Evernote’s pricing, in their free basic service is the
fact that they are now limiting the number of devices that you can sync at any one particular
time.
This is a big deal.
This changes things profoundly for a lot of Evernote users because one of the keys of
using Evernote to collect all of your information and have all of your data stored in one place
is the fact that you can then access that data wherever you and whenever you are from
any of your devices.
That was before.
Today, you can access your information if you’re on the free plan from two devices.
And actually, that’s a bit of a misnomer because through the web we can actually access
it through more devices but I’ll talk about that more in a minute.
So the biggest change now for all of us is in this free basic plan.
You still have 60 MB of data that you can upload.
It’s still free for all of your notes and storing all of your content online and on
multiple devices but it’s only two devices.
So those of you who have a computer and an iPhone or an Android phone, or a computer
and an iPad or a tablet, those are the only two devices that you can use.
So what happens if you have three devices that you want?
Say you have a computer, a tablet and a phone, what are we going to do?
Well, for those people what I’d suggest is you use the Evernote web version on your
computer.
I'm just going to sign into my web version here.
And on your computer, the web version is actually pretty robust and it does most of what you
need.
The reason that I would recommend going this route if you have multiple devices and you
want to stay in the same plan is the access to the camera and the other media features
in your mobile devices, especially on your phone, are far more valuable to you.
Using the Evernote Web Clipper and using the web version of the Evernote, you can do most
of what you need to do within Evernote just on the web so it doesn’t use up one of your
devices.
Now how do you find out how many devices you have enrolled in Evernote right now?
Well, you can do it from all of your different devices in different ways.
Within the web version here, we can just go in account settings by clicking on the bottom
here and then clicking on Settings.
And within our settings here, we can see a device tab.
That device tab will then tell us how many devices we have connected.
I actually have ten devices here.
Now I'm not going to apologize for this because since they changed this now to only allowing
two, it’s the first time I’ve ever thought about how many devices I have hooked up.
And the reason I have so many devices registered is I use a whole bunch of different devices
when I'm testing things out.
So many of these different devices are tools or computers or devices that I have been testing
Evernote on or test-using.
But all you have to do if you want to make a change is go through and revoke access to
any of them and they will be removed from your device menu.
So you see I'm removing several devices.
This same menu, you can access on your mobile device.
Actually, I should just show it to you on the smartphone because we might as well.
Let’s go into Evernote on our smartphone and within Evernote on our smartphone, we
can go into under the gear icon right there, the gear icon which takes us into all of our
settings.
We go into the—oh no, My Account tab is where it is and there we see the number of
devices.
And mine is already updated.
See, my smartphone is already updated to just eight devices now.
But really, I only use four.
I use my Android phone, my iPhone, my Macs, my desktop Mac and my mobile Mac, my Macbook
Pro.
So those are the only devices that I really need to have connected.
So I'm going to need four.
That’s a big decision point for you.
If you’re going to stay with the basic version, yeah, you’re going to have to reduce down
to two devices or you’re going to have to upgrade to the more premium versions.
Now what do you get for more money?
And don’t freak out by looking at my screen because the dollars that you see here are
not US dollars.
They’re those funny Canadian dollars which are worth far less than the American counterpart.
So if you are willing to spend, in my case nearly $50 a year for the Evernote Plus, you
get access to your notebooks offline, you get unlimited devices, which is awesome, and
you get the ability to forward your email to Evernote.
You also get customer support via email, which I don’t think is that big a deal.
These two here, the additional ability to access your notebooks offline and most importantly
the ability to forward emails into Evernote are huge benefits and well worth the money
in my opinion.
Having access to your notebooks offline means that you could be working on your computer
on Evernote when you’re on a flight somewhere, although many flights now have Wi-Fi, although
it costs money to Wi-Fi on flights or internet access on flights.
But accessing your notes when you’re offline, very valuable.
And the ability to forward emails into Evernote is a boon.
It’s something that we use a lot.
I use it every day.
I use it to forward invoices and bills in so that I can keep proper track of all my
accounting and it’s one of the hallmarks, the techniques that we teach in our Evernote
Made Easy course, teaching people how to use Evernote.
The ability to forward emails into Evernote is well worth the investment.
Now I actually purchased the Premium version and I do that for a couple of reasons.
One is my life.
I rely on Evernote for everything organizationally in my life.
So I don’t want them to go away.
So I just buy the Premium version on principle because this is a tool that I want to have
around for a long time to come.
I mean we just have to look at the demise, even though it’s still around, of a tool
like Blab which a lot of us were using for social sharing, for broadcast but they didn’t
have a solid revenue model attached and now they’ve stopped supporting the product and
it’s gone away and not available to us.
I don’t want a tool like Evernote to ever go away because I have so much of my life
built into it.
So I'm always going to want to support it financially.
And actually, even though many of you may rail against this, I'm happy that they’ve
raised the price.
It shows that they’re being fiscally responsible and they’re building a business model that
can continue.
So I am actually a proponent of the price changes.
I'm sure we’ll get some interesting comments on YouTube about this.
Now what else do we get in the Premium version while we’re talking pricing?
Beyond all of the things that you’d get in the first two versions, you get up to 10
GB of data uploaded per month and that is a bit of a non-issue for me.
I've never ever in my life come close to my headroom of the amount of data to upload to
Evernote.
Perhaps some of you have but I never have.
Additionally now, you’ve got some really more sophisticated features, the ability to
annotate PDFs, to be able to do more search capabilities and some really nice integration.
For example when you do searching in Google, it’ll bring up your Evernote notes that
have related content as well.
So it’s got some nice additional features there as well as the ability to scan and digitize
business cards which a lot of people like.
And they’ve also got a presentation module which I've shown in the past in my course
but it’s not something that I've ever used an awful lot.
So a few extra dollars a month, you get to the Premium version and you really don’t
have to worry.
Every single feature within Evernote is going to be available to you.
Now before we leave this, since we are talking about Evernote and them changing the pricing,
occasionally even when they’re not changing the pricing, they upgrade services and give
us some more tools.
One example is this here, the Add passcode lock on all mobile apps.
This was never available before.
This was just released recently and it was kind of an upgrade to the free version.
This is not the only tool that they’ve upgraded to the free version.
A few—maybe it was a year ago now, they also allowed the free version to start to
share notes and they allowed us to start sharing and having discussion on notes, which used
to be a Premium service.
So Evernote’s watching very carefully what happens in the marketplace and they’re giving
a lot of the main basic tools that people really need.
They’re making sure they’re available in the basic version.
So it’s not always just about getting money; they’re also concerned about their community.
So kudos to them for adding this passcode lock.
Let me show you how we get to that because that is a nice security feature with our mobile
devices.
If you’re choosing one of your devices to be a mobile, which I'm sure you’re all going
to do, adding this, going into your General Settings and adding a passcode lock means
that you can add a second level of security to your smartphone over and above the passcode
lock that’s set into the smartphone.
So if somebody gets into your phone, you can close off your Evernote notes and make them
private with a four-digit passcode here as well.
That’s available in all of the plans now.
So Evernote is not just taking things away.
They are giving some things back as well.
But the bottom line, it’s going to cost a little bit more to use Evernote.
It’s going to be a little less convenient for those on the free plan.
They’re going to have to choose which devices very carefully they want to have Evernote
apply to and hopefully this is the beginning of a really bright future for Evernote, the
fact that now they’re going to have revenue to support ongoing development, ongoing growth
and ongoing support for its community.
Well, I hope that you found this video today to be useful.
Now there are three ways for you to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
The first is please subscribe to this channel.
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I encourage you to drop by our Patreon page, have a look and discover what perks are involved
in supporting DottoTech and one of those perks is free access to Evernote Made Easy, our
very popular course on using Evernote.
So it might well be worth checking out, don’t you think?
That’s it for today.
Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!