Evernote
The note-taking service with the elephant logo that taught a generation to save everything in the cloud — and then taught the same generation to leave.
Founded by Russian-born entrepreneur Stepan Pachikov, the service launched publicly in 2008, with Phil Libin as CEO until 2015. The pitch was "Remember everything": notes, web clippings, receipts and photos with text recognition, synced across every device. The freemium model made it one of the first apps millions of people actually paid for.
Then the product sprawled — chat, a web shop selling backpacks and socks — while the core got slower. In 2016 the free plan was capped at two devices, and users drifted to Notion and Obsidian. Italian company Bending Spoons bought Evernote in early 2023, laid off most of the staff and squeezed the free tier further still.