How much does Evernote cost in 2026?

According to users discussing the July 2026 repricing, Evernote Starter is $99.00 a year or $14.99 a month, and Evernote Advanced is $249.99 a year or $24.99 a month. Starter is described as limited to 1 GB of storage, 1,000 notes and 20 notebooks.

What is the difference between Evernote Starter and Advanced?

One user quoted the announcement email as saying the only difference between the tiers is limited versus unlimited storage, rather than any feature difference. That matters if your notebooks are full of scanned images, because scans consume storage far faster than typed notes.

Can I export my Evernote notes before cancelling?

Yes. Evernote supports exporting notebooks to ENEX, and attachments come with them. Export before your subscription lapses rather than after, because access to bulk export is tied to having an active account in good standing.

What replaces Evernote for scanned documents?

No single app replaces all of it. Storage and sync are handled by any cloud drive, or by the Files app locally. Text extraction from the scans is a separate job handled by an OCR tool. Structured notes are a third thing. Splitting the problem is usually cheaper and more durable than finding one replacement.

Will I lose the ability to search inside my scanned images?

That depends on where the scans land. Search inside an image only works if something has extracted the text. If you move scans to a plain cloud folder, run them through OCR first or you will have images you cannot search.

Evernote Now Wants $249 a Year. Here's How to Get Your Scanned Documents Out

On 11 July 2026, a thread appeared on the TidBITS forum titled “Evernote 2026 price tiers floored me.” The numbers, as posted there:

Evernote Starter — $99.00 a year, or $14.99 a month
Evernote Advanced — $249.99 a year, or $24.99 a month

Starter is described as capped at 1 GB of storage, 1,000 notes and 20 notebooks.

One reply is worth quoting in full, because it explains why this lands differently depending on what you kept in there. Quantumpanda wrote:

They’re not even pretending that the “Advanced” tier actually has features not available on the “Starter” tiers, the email I got explicitly states that the only difference between tiers is (extremely) limited storage versus unlimited storage.

If your Evernote is mostly typed notes, 1 GB is a lot of years. If your Evernote is mostly scanned paper, 1 GB is a few hundred pages. That’s the whole story: the repricing hits document archivists hardest, and they’re the people least able to walk away, because their archive is the point.

Matt McCaffrey put that plainly in the same thread:

The years of organizing, tagging, and ensuring it was easy to retrieve product manuals, household ephemera, medical information, and so on, requires the Advanced tier.

The mistake people make when leaving

They look for one app that does everything Evernote did. There isn’t one, and hunting for it is why migrations stall for months.

Evernote was doing at least four separate jobs:

Storing files and syncing them across devices
Extracting text from images so scans were searchable
Organising notes into notebooks and tags
Capturing new material from a phone camera or a web clipper

Each of those has a good, cheap, separate answer in 2026. Bundled together they cost $249.99 a year. Unbundled, most people land near zero.

Splitting the four jobs

Storage and sync. Any cloud drive you already pay for, or the Files app if you want it local. Scanned PDFs are just files. This is the job Evernote charged the most for and the one that has been commoditised hardest.

Text extraction. This is the part people forget, and the one that quietly breaks the archive. Evernote ran OCR on your scans server-side, which is why searching for a word printed on a receipt found the receipt. Move those images to a plain folder and that stops working. The images come across fine; the searchability doesn’t.

So run them through OCR on the way out, or accept that you now have a folder of pictures you can’t search.

Organisation. Folders and filenames, honestly. A date-first naming convention gets you most of what tags did, and it survives every future migration because it isn’t tied to anyone’s product. I’ve written up a naming scheme that has held up for me.

Capture. The iPhone scanner in Files or the Preview app in iOS 26. Both free, both already installed.

Export before you cancel, not after

The order matters. Bulk export is tied to having an active account in good standing, so do it while the subscription is still live.

Export notebooks to ENEX, which brings attachments with them. Then check a sample: open three or four notes that contained scans and confirm the images actually came through at full resolution rather than as thumbnails. Do this before the renewal date, not on it.

If you have years of material, expect the export itself to take a while and to produce a file larger than you assume.

Where I fit, and where I don’t

I build Textora, a free OCR app, which makes me an interested party in exactly one of the four jobs above.

It handles the text-extraction part: batch scanning, on-device processing, no account, and structured output rather than a wall of raw text. If your problem is “I have a folder of scans and I need them searchable,” that’s the piece.

What it explicitly is not:

It is not an Evernote replacement. It doesn’t store your notebooks, doesn’t sync across devices, doesn’t do web clipping, and has no tag system. Anyone telling you a single OCR app replaces a notes platform is selling you something.

It won’t migrate your archive for you. There’s no ENEX importer. You export from Evernote, then process what came out.

It’s iPhone-only. If your archive lives on a Windows machine, this isn’t your tool, and a desktop OCR package will serve you better.

For a lot of former Evernote users the honest answer is Apple Notes plus a cloud folder, which is what Kat634e in that thread ended up doing. They reported the cancellation itself was easy.

Whether to leave at all

Not automatically. If your archive is genuinely large and genuinely load-bearing, and if the search actually works well for you, $249.99 buys back a migration you’d otherwise spend a weekend on. Nobody’s time is free either.

The case for leaving is strongest when your notebooks are mostly scanned paper you rarely open but can’t delete. That’s a storage problem wearing a productivity app’s clothing, and storage is the one thing you can now get almost anywhere for a fraction of the price.

I build Textora, a free on-device OCR app, so I have an interest in one narrow part of this and I’ve tried to be clear about where that ends. Prices and tiers above are as reported by users in the linked July 2026 thread; check Evernote’s own pricing page before making a decision. If something here is out of date, email support@textora.app and I’ll correct it and note what changed.

Sources: TidBITS Talk — “Evernote 2026 price tiers floored me”, 11 July 2026