Short answer: Evernote has a Free plan capped at 50 notes, one notebook and one device, then two paid plans for individuals. Starter costs $99 a year and Advanced costs $249.99 a year, with higher prices if you pay month to month. Teams and larger companies go on custom Enterprise pricing. The AI features, including semantic search, sit on Advanced.
If you last looked at Evernote a few years ago, almost every number has changed. The plan names are different, the free tier is a fraction of what it was, and the renewal notice many long-time users received was a shock. Below are the current plans, what the price increase actually did, and how to decide whether the Advanced tier is worth $249.99 for the way you use it.
Evernote pricing in 2026: the current plans
Evernote discontinued its Personal and Professional plans and replaced them with Starter and Advanced. The limits come from Evernote's own plan comparison page and the annual prices are the US list prices for yearly billing.
| Plan | Price (US, billed yearly) | Notes | Notebooks | Devices | AI features |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 50 | 1 | 1 | Limited |
| Starter | $99 a year (about $8.25 a month) | 1,000 | 20 | 3 | Limited |
| Advanced | $249.99 a year (about $20.83 a month) | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | AI Assistant, Semantic Search, AI Transcribe, AI Edit |
| Enterprise | Custom, through sales | Custom | Custom | Custom | Full set, plus admin controls and SSO |
Storage follows the same ladder: 1 GB on Free, 5 GB on Starter and unlimited on Advanced, with attachment caps of 200 on Free and 1,000 on Starter. Month-to-month billing is available on both paid plans and costs noticeably more than the yearly rate, so check the figure at checkout before you commit.
How much does Evernote cost per year?
For one person, Evernote costs $99 a year on Starter or $249.99 a year on Advanced. The Free plan costs nothing, but 50 notes is a trial more than a working plan: anyone who has used Evernote for more than a few weeks will pass it. In practice, a real Evernote user is choosing between $99 and $249.99 a year.
The gap between those two is the whole decision. Starter's 1,000-note ceiling and three devices cover a lot of personal use. Advanced exists for people with a large archive, people who read Evernote on more than three devices, and people who want the AI tools. If you are not in one of those groups, Starter is the plan.
The Evernote price increase, and why renewals jumped
Bending Spoons bought Evernote and changed the pricing in stages. In 2023 the annual Personal plan went from $69.99 to $129.99, one of the steepest increases a mainstream productivity app has pushed through. In December 2023 the Free plan was cut to 50 notes and one notebook for every account, including accounts that were years old. Then Personal and Professional were retired in favor of Starter and Advanced.
That sequence is why "Evernote price increase" is still a common search. Many people did not notice the change when it was announced. They noticed when an automatic renewal went through at a much higher number than the year before. If that just happened to you, ask Evernote support whether a refund is still possible, and decide which of the three situations below you are in before you renew or move.
Is Evernote worth the price? Three kinds of user
You write and organize notes every day
Evernote is still a capable notes app with a good web clipper, reliable sync and years of polish. If you open it daily to write, file and find your own notes, $99 a year for Starter is a fair price for a mature tool, and moving a large archive has its own cost in time. Staying is a reasonable choice.
You mostly store documents and search them
This is the group that feels the price increase hardest. Many long-time users stopped writing notes in Evernote years ago and use it as a filing cabinet: scanned letters, PDF contracts, statements, manuals, receipts. The search inside images and PDFs is the reason they stayed. For that use, the question is not "which notes app is cheapest" but "what is the best way to get answers out of a pile of documents," and that is a different product category.
You want AI on top of your archive
Semantic Search and the AI Assistant are on Advanced, so the AI version of Evernote costs $249.99 a year. That is worth it if you also need unlimited notes and devices. If the AI is the only reason to upgrade, you are paying for a lot of notes infrastructure to get question answering over your files.
Evernote pricing compared with the alternatives
These are the tools people most often price against Evernote once the renewal arrives. Prices are US list prices from each vendor's own pricing page.
| Tool | Price (US) | Best for | AI over your own documents |
|---|---|---|---|
| Evernote Starter | $99 a year | Daily notes and web clipping, up to 1,000 notes | Limited |
| Evernote Advanced | $249.99 a year | Large archives across many devices | Yes, AI Assistant and Semantic Search |
| Obsidian | Free, including for work. Sync $4 a month billed yearly, Sync Plus $8. | Notes you write yourself, stored as local files | Only through community plugins with your own API key |
| Capacities | Free Basic. Pro $9.99 a month billed yearly. | Structured notes built around objects like people and projects | Paid AI add-on |
| MentalClone | 474 PLN a year (about $11 a month), or 79 PLN monthly (about $21) | A document library you question in plain English | Built in, answers restricted to your uploads |
Notice what the table says about the filing-cabinet user. Obsidian and Capacities are both good, and both are notes apps: they expect you to write and structure. If what you had in Evernote was mostly documents, moving to another notes app keeps the same mismatch at a different price. Our Obsidian alternative comparison and the Capacities pricing breakdown cover those two in detail if notes are your main use, and the personal knowledge management app comparison lays out the wider category by how you work.
What to use if Evernote is really a document archive
A document-first tool reverses the job. Instead of filing each scan into a notebook and hoping search finds the right word later, you upload the documents and ask the question you actually have: "what is the deductible on the home policy," "when does the office lease renew," "what did the contractor quote for the roof." The answer comes back in plain English with the name of the file it came from, so you can open the source and check it.
MentalClone works this way. It reads PDF, Word, Excel, text files and photographed or scanned pages (text PDFs up to 120 pages, scanned PDFs up to 40 pages with OCR, files up to 100 MB), and it answers only from what you uploaded. When your documents do not contain the answer, it says so rather than guessing, which matters when the question is about a contract or a policy. It runs in any browser, so there is no device limit to buy your way past.
The honest limits: it is not a notes app. There is no editor, no web clipper and no notebooks. Each answer draws on your 50 most recently uploaded documents and quotes from up to four of them, so it suits the working set you actually ask about (current contracts, this year's paperwork, active client files) rather than twenty years of everything. For that working set, about $11 a month billed yearly is less than half of Evernote Advanced. Receipts are a special case: if they are most of what you scan, an expense tool that reads receipts and categorizes spending will do more with them than any archive. And if your documents are research papers and reports rather than household paperwork, the AI second brain page shows how the same approach works for professional reading.
Questions people ask about Evernote pricing
How much is Evernote per month?
Billed yearly, Evernote Starter works out to about $8.25 a month ($99 a year) and Advanced to about $20.83 a month ($249.99 a year). Paying month to month costs more on both plans. The Free plan is $0 but limited to 50 notes, one notebook and one device.
Is Evernote still free?
Yes, but the free plan is small. Since December 2023 it allows 50 notes and one notebook on one device, with 1 GB of storage. That is enough to try the app, not to run a real archive. Most existing users who had more than 50 notes had to upgrade or stop adding notes.
Why did Evernote raise its prices?
After Bending Spoons acquired Evernote, it moved the product to a smaller free tier and higher paid prices to fund development. The annual Personal plan rose from $69.99 to $129.99 in 2023, and the older plans were later replaced by Starter at $99 a year and Advanced at $249.99 a year.
What is the difference between Evernote Starter and Advanced?
Starter allows 1,000 notes, 20 notebooks, 3 devices and 5 GB of storage for $99 a year. Advanced removes those caps, adds unlimited devices and storage, and includes the AI features: AI Assistant, Semantic Search, AI Transcribe and AI Edit. It costs $249.99 a year.
Does Evernote have AI?
Yes. Evernote offers an AI Assistant, Semantic Search, AI Transcribe for audio and AI Edit for rewriting notes. The full set is on Advanced and Enterprise; Free and Starter get limited access. If AI search is the only reason you would upgrade, compare the $249.99 against tools that include AI at a lower price.
What is the cheapest alternative to Evernote?
For notes, Obsidian is free to use, including for work, with optional Sync from $4 a month billed yearly. For a document archive you want answers from, MentalClone starts at about $11 a month billed yearly. Which is cheaper in practice depends on whether you mainly write notes or mainly store files.
The fastest way to know whether a question tool fits your archive is to try it on a real document. Paste a page from a policy, contract or statement into the box at the top of this article and ask it something you would normally dig through Evernote to find.