I'm in a paperless trap of my own making

We’ve been running a paperless house for years now. Any paper that crosses the threshold is either scanned and filed (if important) or put in the bin. It’s due to a trauma response on my part¹, but it actually makes general life admin a lot easier, and keeps the house free of clutter. I’ve felt pretty smug about it all until recently.

We use Evernote to store all our documents. You can store thousands of PDFs and then Search within those PDFs (because OCR is built in to the product). The search is pretty fast and you can do it from any computer or phone. This reason alone is why I still pay for Evernote. In terms of actual note authoring, I think Obsidian is much better, and would probably even choose Notion before Evernote. But (as far as I can tell) other services can’t let me scan, save and search PDFs as well as Evernote can, so I was fine with the subscription.

Our yearly Evernote subscription just went from $89.99 AUD/year to $159.99 AUD/year. Now I’m more than happy to pay for software, but a 70+% increase in a single year is taking the piss. Considering the price hike coincides with the addition of AI Features, I can’t help but wonder if I’m just subsidising power users overdosing on OpenAI credits.

The price change was a reality check. Oops! I’ve put all of the important documents from the last 10 years in to a corporate entity’s software offering and now they can charge whatever they want for me to use it!

If you know of any good cross-platform (Andy is a Windows user) software that can do the search in PDfs thing, please let me know!

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This has been post no. 4 for #WeblogPoMo2024 and it is what I was interested in today.

Footnotes

1. My mum died young, without a will. It took my sister and I months of sorting through random bits of paperwork in the house and making phone calls, before we could piece together her full financial situation. If you have dependants of any kind and you don’t have a will in place, PLEASE get it sorted ASAP. ↩