When Evernote started offering “unlimited monthly uploads” for its Premium users a few months ago, little did they know that people would start signing up and then using their service as a sort of extended hard drive or cloud service. Or they should have seen that coming, given consumer behavior when offered something “unlimited”. So now, the note taking app has come up with a new policy, removing the word and concept of unlimited in order to properly manage avoid deterioration of service.
Introducing the unlimited monthly uploads was meant to be an added service for those praying for Evernote Premium. But users then started using it for backing up their large files and acting like it’s their cloud server for massive, sometimes multi-media documents. Of course, this led to a “degradation in service quality” (their own words) as their servers couldn’t handle the amount of data being uploaded. Evernote clarified that they are a productivity service “not your second hard drive”.
So now, after determining what their regular user base actually needs, Evernote is now removing the term unlimited and setting a limit of 10GB per month. If you’re not uploading photos or music or videos, then that should be more than enough for you. But if you feel like you’re being “cheated” out of your premium subscription, then they will refund your purchase.
The promise from Evernote though is that they will improve the services and eventually keep raising the limit if the users are “good” in not using it for uploading heavy files in the cloud. Let’s see if this new model will backfire on them or if it will be a good thing for both the service and the premium customers.
SOURCE: Evernote
