There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're a user of one of these services you might take it as a hint to find an alternative.
I usually say in interviews that my preferred time to join a company is at the end of stage 1 (start up) and the start of phase 2 (organizing).
Nothing makes me happier than to be told "Hey, we got this up and running and it's a mess. Now we need someone to turn this into a system that is easy to modify and maintain."
Debatable
here is a solid article from this week's Economist (that mentions another real jewel of a company):
https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/01/can-bending-sp...
I believe it imports Evernote data too.
So I downloaded my data, and had Claude vibecode a fully-featured clone in a single evening. Even if I was paying Anthropic API rates, it cost me less than a single year of my Solo plan.
So if anybody is reading this? They absolutely will gouge you. All the stories you've read are all true. Take some advice and get out while you can.
Don't forget "slash the workforce, ensuring that the product will get worse over time".
> After the acquisition, Bending Spoons is anything but a passive owner, making changes to the products’ user experience and features, as well as to the underlying tech; monetization strategy, including pricing; and team organization, including headcount.
> While this focus on efficiency and revenue overlaps with private equity strategies, Bending Spoons claims a key difference: It “aims to hold forever, and has never sold an acquired business.” It is building a live portfolio, not presiding over a tech graveyard.
That last line has me wondering who wrote this.
As for my opinion on the company, I don’t really see anything particularly negative about it. I think the fact that they’ve never sold an acquired business is a rather admirable trait.
In a way, they’re doing something that may not have been possible without this style of intervention, which is to keep companies/products that would have otherwise disappeared viable.
For a company like Evernote it wouldn’t be better for their customers if the company liquidated. There are worse things that can happen to your service provider of choice than price increases or worse customer support.
Charging $20,000 for a note-taking app subscription is not that.
The $20,000 price plan wasn’t a real price, that was just a not so gentle nudge to move to a different offering. Maybe it feels bad but that plan effectively doesn’t exist anymore. Things change.
It’s got fewer features for the dollar, but if the previous company was not sustainable in the first place, it is what it is.
A company raising prices or cutting service quality is only a problem if they’re in a monopoly situation with no other market alternatives. None of the companies Bending Spoons has acquired are in that position. Many of them are far from being the market leaders.
I looked through their assets and it clicked: “this is where software goes to die”
I mean, they're at least keeping the service alive for as long as possible.
"customers who stick around." is anthesis to mid- to long-term customer loyalty when you do "jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible"
Customer "inertia" or "lock-in" might be better terms to describe what the company is looking for in an acquisition.
Their ideal customer may well be someone who's forgotten they have a subscription on credit card auto-pay.
> Speaking to TechCrunch, co-founder and chief product officer Matteo Danieli said some of the scrutiny was due to the fact that products such as Evernote were genuinely loved by their users. But he said that despite all the changes, customer retention has been “remarkably stable.”
Ah yes. In other news, the prison population size is also remarkably stable.
Most things with royalties (oil fields, songs) work like this.
And yet dairy farms can last for centuries.