The only criticism I could find about Apollo is that Yahoo Finance is now reporting very positively on Apollo products and companies. That’s all I could find.
Am I missing the whole picture?
I’m not sure this is correct. Could you be confusing revenue growth with user growth? It seems Evernote didn’t triple its subscribers; Bending Spoons tripled Evernote’s revenue ($100M to over $300M) by aggressively doubling and tripling subscription fees while locking out free users. Similarly, it appears Vimeo’s numbers didn’t triple in users; Bending Spoons tripled Vimeo’s operational profits by instantly slashing overhead costs and raising rates on the corporate clients they already had. Bending Spoons doesn’t seem to expand user bases; their entire playbook seems to rely on making a smaller, deeply locked-in pool of users pay exponentially more money.
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As it turns out, it was Google’s Gemini summary of my search results that was confused. You are correct, revenue growth.
I do still find it interesting. We users often conflate our own disappointment over price hikes with reality. We assume the company will lose both customers and money, but they often generate more revenue. If Bending Spoons can increase their net profit after acquisition then it would seem their strategy is sound. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I hung on longer than most as an EN user. It’s ubiquity was so good. Clip a web page, jot a note, take a scan (their scanner app was the best I’ve used), email directly to Evernote. It just worked so well.
There were some hiccups for sure, and with BS taking over there were also some improvements. But the price is just crazy now. Was Evernote valuable to me? Yes. Is it worth hundreds of dollars a year? No.
I use Bear now. A worthy replacement. Mac only which is fine, $40 a year which is fine. I do miss some features of Evernote but it’s just too expensive for my use case now.
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I would agree with you, but only if I was Bending Spoons. I’m looking at this from a customer perspective. From this perspective Bending Spoons is profiting at my expense without any real interest in me as a customer other than me being part of their cash cow. This is IMO sadly an increasing trend. This becomes clearly apparent with games where the game isn’t now created for the users enjoyment, but for how much revenue can be milked out of them. Now software providers are adding subscriptions to apps that have no real infrastructure costs or charging basic subscription cost but if you want to sync or some other feature that’s extra, and so forth.
Ironically, as AI improves and users either cannot afford the increase or simply become sick of in app purchases and subscriptions, more and more will use AI to code their own bespoke solutions. I will most likely join them. I fully appreciate what developers do and have done, but this change in software annoys me. The number of Indie developers I have supported over the years only for them to sell out to a major corporation when they are successful, or developers where I’ve helped develop their software and had to grit through alpha/beta incompleteness only to be priced out when it’s fully released, push me towards paying AI instead and creating my own solutions. No subs, no push to upgrade OS because the only supported version is now the latest buggy OS, no behind the scenes dialling home to some server or monetising my data. I may even be able to stay on a single computer longer as I have no need to upgrade. Perhaps AI will kill the era of the developer and the need to purchase software.
Actually from their prospectus, they said themselves “The increase in Evernote revenue was driven by higher subscription revenue resulting from an increase in average revenue per subscriber, partly offset by a decrease in the number of subscribers.” (you can just cmd + f that, EDGAR is not that great).
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The number of times I’ve seen a forum or social media post with a veiled threat of quitting as if one person leaving would influence a company.
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Surely, you do know BendingSpoons’ principals lurk here, persistently hoping that everyone speaks nicely about them?
Katie
How do you know I’m not one of them 
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I rather doubt they would give a 2nd thought to this little corner of the internet.
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You might be surprised how often this site ends up in people’s search results. I posted a link to some Logitech software in 2019 and its had over 14,000 clicks.
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