If you're an App Store veteran like me, when you hear the name "Evernote" you think of the most popular note taking app in the App Store. If you don't know the name it's probably because Evernote's popularity is a thing of the past...
Since 2017, Evernote's monthly downloads dropped 88% in a trend that's clearly not stopping any time soon.
So, that's downloads. Revenue on the other hand, is following a very different trend.
Since 2021, Evernote's net revenue from the App Store and Google Play grew 64%.
According to our estimates, Evernote saw $1.6M of net revenue, that's after giving Apple and Google their fees, in July. And that was roughly 300K higher than the average of the three previous months.
Why so high? Evernote increased its subscription price and didn't grandfather any of its users which led to an immediate bump in revenue.
With downloads declining, one way companies could increase revenue is by charging their current users more. But... that comes at the cost of paying users churning.
Evernote must have seen that churn and figured an increase wouldn't hurt as much as it'd help. Although in the short term that seems to have been the case, the real question is how many users will stick around longer, and how much harder will it be to convert the decreasing amount of new users with the new prices.
I expect more apps to follow this trend because it leads to "easy money", but I suspect most of the apps who do that will find that in the long term, grandfathering existing users and increasing the prices only to new ones is a better way to grow.
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