Evernote is a productivity cloud software and app used for taking notes so you can save and organize your ideas.
Using a simple drag-and-drop interface, you can “clip” and save a variety of media including text, photos, video and audio from anywhere on the internet.
For convenience, you can sync your saved media between multiple devices so everything’s always available on your desktop, tablet & your smartphone.
And if you want to collaborate or share your notes with friends, family or team members, this can easily be done with Evernote.
Getting Started With Evernote
Evernote is available as a free app which allows you to get started immediately without paying. It may be fine for basic use but if you want to be more productive and get the most out of Evernote, they also have two premium plans that gives you more.
With the free app, you can:
With a Premium or Business account, you can do a lot more with Evernote and also remove some of the limitations of the free account.
Each plan lets you get started with a free trial which runs for 14 days. You’ll need to enter your credit card info in order to activate your free trial. You won’t be charged until the trial ends and you can cancel at anytime before the trial ends.
How To Get Your Free Evernote Trial
If you decide that you want to do more than what the free, basic version of Evernote allows, you may want to sign up for a Premium account.
A Premium account costs $7.99/month but you can get started with a free 14 day trial. Here’s how to start your free trial.
1. Go to Evernote Premium page
- From anywhere on the Evernote website, move your mouse over the “Plans” menu item at the top of the site.
- Click on Evernote Premium to go to the Evernote Premium page.
2. Click on “Start Free Trial” button
On this page, click on the “Start Free Trial” button.
3. Sign into your Evernote account
- Clicking on the “Start Free Trial” button takes you to the sign in screen. If you’ve been using the free version of Evernote, you should be able to sign in with Google, Apple or your email address or username.
- If it’s your first time using Evernote and you don’t have an account as yet, you can create an account from here.
4. Upgrade to Premium
When you sign in, you’ll be taken to the upgrade screen where you can see the plan choices. The Premium plan is highlighted because this is the plan you chose earlier on.
- Decide if you prefer to be billed yearly or monthly. You can toggle the button to choose. Yearly subscribers get a discount so it works out to be $5.83 per month instead of $7.99 if you choose to get billed monthly.
- Click on the “Upgrade To Premium” button to continue.
5. Enter billing information
On this screen, you’ll enter your billing information. You have a choice of using a credit card or PayPal.
You should make a note of the highlighted section in the screenshot above which tells you when you’ll be charged. Evernote won’t charge you until the free trial ends which is when your plan actually begins.
If you took the yearly option then you’ll be charged $69.99 when the trial ends and this should auto-renew on the same day next year. If you took the monthly option then you’ll be charged $7.99 when the trial ends and auto-renews every month around the same time until you cancel.
6. Enjoy your free trial
When you’re done filling out the billing details and press the “Start Free Trial” button, you’ll be taken to this screen. Your free trial has started and you can enjoy the benefits of a Premium Evernote account.
How To Cancel Your Free Trial
If for some reason you don’t want to be charged at the end of your free trial, you can cancel your trial anytime before the 14 days are up so you don’t get auto-charged.
Evernote makes cancelling easy and I’ll put the steps below so you can follow them to cancel your trial.
After the trial ends, if you feel like continuing with a Premium (or Business account), all you need to do is pay the subscription fee.
To cancel your account, follow these steps.
1. Go to your account info
- Inside your account, click on your name at the top of the screen.
- In the drop down menu, click on “Account info…”
2. Manage subscription
The above page will open after clicking. Both the Billing menu item in the left sidebar and the “Manage subscription” link will take you to the same page where you will find info on how you’re being billed and where you can cancel your subscription to prevent being auto-charged.
3. Cancel subscription
Right at the bottom of the page, you’ll find the link to cancel your Evernote subscription. Click this link to continue.
4. Yes, downgrade to basic.
On the next page, Evernote will let you know that cancelling means that you’re downgrading to a basic or free account which means losing the benefits of a Premium account.
They do this to get you to stay with Premium. You can still cancel and enjoy the remaining time on your 14 day free trial.
Just scroll to the bottom of the page to “downgrade to Basic”.
Be assured that you won’t lose access to Premium if you downgrade to Basic Evernote at this point. You will still be able to use Premium until your free trial ends.
After that, you’ll go back to Basic and if you decide you still need Premium, you can pay the subscription fee and regain access to your Premium account.
5. One final thing…
There is one final step to cancelling your Evernote subscription during the free trial period.
They would like to know why you’re cancelling so they’ve set up a survey to collect your feedback.
You can choose the appropriate reason for cancelling before submitting via the cancel button. Here, I chose “I don’t want auto-renewal” which is the closest thing to why I’m outlining these steps but you can chose any option that is applicable to your situation.
On clicking the last cancel button, you’ll get the above notice which confirms that your account is back to free but you still have access to Premium features until the end of the free trial.
To confirm that you wouldn’t be charged after your trial ends, you can go back to the the Billing page inside your account (see step 2), and you’ll see that although you still have Premium, the message under now says that your subscription will not renew.
You’ll also notice that the link to cancel your subscription is now gone.
Why Upgrade to Evernote Premium?
Evernote offers a free version of their application which is great by itself.
I used it for years without upgrading to a paid account but on the other hand, I was not a heavy user of Evernote. I also didn’t sync between devices as I only used the web application to save notes.
Evernote Basic was just good enough for me but if you’re the type of user who wants to power up your productivity and have a place where you can constantly collect and organize your ideas then you may need more than the free version of Evernote.
Basic has a number of limitations and Premium adds a lot of useful features.
With Basic you can only sync between two devices. Paid plans allow you to sync between unlimited devices. This allows you to have Evernote on your smartphone while you’re out which is when you might have an idea. You can record an audio note and save it then access it later on your desktop or tablet.
If you go offline, you can only access your notes on the desktop application while a paid account allows you to access your notes via both desktop & mobile.
Basic limits you to 25MB per note while you can save up to 200MB notes with a paid account. Furthermore, you have a monthly upload limit of 60MB using Basic while you can upload up to 10GB on a Premium account and even more on a Business account.
If you plan to use Evernote a lot then the limitation on how much you can save will become annoying.
For features available to Premium users that are not available to free users, you can:
And while free users have access to forum support, only paid accounts have access to chat and email support when needed.
Business accounts have even more features to support team members such as spaces where you can share everything and a higher upload limit (20GB plus 2GB for each member).
With a free 14 day trial to Premium or a Business account, you’ll be able to have full access (no limitations to whichever account type you choose.
