Job ticket 601842 · consumer · sticky stack · no subscription
Evernote stops you at 50 notes. The triage was never the part worth paying for.
This page is a sticky stack. You paste a pile of raw notes, a free-tier model routes every slip — action, reference, calendar, archive, or honestly unsorted — and your browser renders the ledger row by row, so filing becomes a two-minute read-down instead of a paid subscription feature.
Evernote is a trademark of Bending Spoons US Inc. This is an independent, unaffiliated comparison built on Evernote's own published plan page, linked below and re-read every thirty days.
Triage pile — rendered in this browser
Sample data is illustrative, not a claim about Evernote. Every Evernote figure on this page comes from the linked pricing page, read 2026-09-27.
The prompt pack
Two prompts, each mapped one-to-one onto a Evernote feature you are currently rationed on. Run them from this page with a free key, or copy them into any free chat model — the text is identical either way, and it is printed in full at the bottom of this section so it survives this site.
Loading the pack from tools.json… If this fails, the full prompt text is still readable below.
One-time unlocks only, never a subscription. If a price ever appears here it was read from Stripe in that request, not typed by hand. An unlock is client-side gating, not secure payment verification: it is stored in this browser and cannot prove payment to anyone else.
What Evernote's own pricing page says
Read from evernote.com/compare-plans on 2026-09-27. Fields we could not read are marked unconfirmed rather than filled in with a plausible number.
| The job | Evernote Free | Advanced (US$20.83) | This page + a free-tier model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | US$0 — but 50 notes is the lifetime of the plan | US$20.83 / month, billed US$249.99 a year | US$0 forever. A free-tier key costs nothing; the prompts are yours. |
| Organizing your pile | You do it by hand inside a 1-notebook, 20-tag cage | AI organization, tags and spaces at plan scale | Prompt 1 routes every slip to a named destination — outside Evernote's cage entirely, in a file you keep |
| Knowing what the week collected | Not on the Free plan — that is a paid assistant feature | Monthly/weekly AI recaps | Prompt 2 writes the weekly digest from notes you paste, and omits sections the notes can't support |
| Where your notes live | Evernote's servers, 1 GB a month at a time | Evernote's servers, wider | Nowhere new. The triage ledger is a Markdown download only your machine ever holds. |
What this replaces, and what it does not
A displacement claim you cannot substantiate is a lie with good typography. This is the whole scope, including the parts where Evernote wins.
Replaced: the 50-note capture squeeze
The triage and digest run on text you paste from anywhere — when Free refuses note 51, the workflow does not notice.
Replaced: the organizing decision layer
Destination, notebook, at most two tags, one next action per slip — the exact judgment Advanced automates, printed as a workable ledger instead of a chat answer.
Replaced: the weekly review habit
A digest that refuses to pad, with OVERDUE only where a note names a date — the mirror part of a review app, at US$0, exportable.
NOT the notebook
No syncing, no devices, no OCR, no web clipper, no search. Your notes keep living wherever they live now; this page only sorts them.
NOT the storage
1 GB is Evernote's ceiling, not yours: the prompts carry whatever you paste in and hand back a file. Nothing here holds a byte between runs.
NOT a verdict on the per-feature table
The comparison page's feature-checkmarks did not render in our fetch; anywhere this site is silent about a checkmark, that is silence on evidence, not a claim.
The prompts, in full, as text
Copy these into any model. They are the product; the page around them is convenience. Each block is the exact system prompt the interactive runner sends, plus the user-message template.
Prompt 01 — 1. Capture triage · evernote-capture-triage v1.0.0 · best ally: Groq Cloud — free tier · llama-3.3-70b-versatile
Replaces: Evernote Advanced's auto-organization and the Free plan's notebook/tag rationing: deciding what each pasted note is and where it belongs.
Why this model: Triaging is classification with reasons attached, not composition. A fast instruct model at low temperature routes dozens of fragments in one pass; a chat-tuned model starts rewriting your notes, which is the one thing a triage ledger must not do. Fallback ally: Copy-Paste Relay.
System prompt (1377 chars):
You are a records clerk working a sticky stack: every slip you receive gets exactly one destination and one action. You never rewrite the note; you route it.
Return ONLY one JSON object. No markdown fences, no commentary, no preamble.
{
"kicker": string (max 8 words),
"title": string (max 8 words),
"subhead": string (max 20 words),
"items": [
{ "title": string (the slip, quoted or summarized in <= 12 words), "tag": string (one of ACTION | REFERENCE | CALENDAR | ARCHIVE | UNSORTABLE), "body": string (max 30 words: destination note type, target notebook, 1-2 tags, and the next physical action) }
]
}
Hard rules:
1. One item per input slip, same order as the input. Never merge or split slips.
2. Every tag must be one of the five listed values; UNSORTABLE is honest, not lazy — use it when the slip lacks the context to route it and say in body what is missing.
3. Destinations must be plausible inside a plan the reader might actually own; do not invent a fifteen-notebook taxonomy. Default to at most 5 distinct notebook names across the whole run and reuse them.
4. Tags: at most 2 per slip, lowercase, and the total distinct tags across the run must stay <= 20 because that is the free plan's real ceiling.
5. The body names one next action in imperative form ('call X by Friday'), never a vague intention.
6. Write in the language of the input slips.
User message template:
Variables:
{{slips}}— Your raw notes, one per line (max 4000 chars) sample data shipped with the tool{{notebooks}}— Notebooks you already have (max 300 chars) sample data shipped with the tool
Output schema (the answer must match this exactly):
Decoding: temperature 0.2 · max 1600 output tokens · responseMimeType application/json · budget ~700 in / ~900 out per run of twelve slips · cost per run: 1 request. Groq's published base is 1,000 requests/day; this is 0.1% of it, and the relay floor uses no key at all.
Prompt 02 — 2. Weekly digest · evernote-weekly-digest v1.0.0 · best ally: Google Gemini API — Free usage tier · gemini-2.5-flash-lite
Replaces: The review habit Evernote sells with Advanced (AI summaries and monthly digests): what your notes collected this week, written back to you as one sheet.
Why this model: Summarizing a week of scraps is a long-context read with a short, structured answer — Flash-lite's free tier fits the whole pasted week in one request, and the house style needs its JSON mode to keep the digest copy-pasteable. Fallback ally: OpenRouter — :free model variants.
System prompt (1277 chars):
You write one weekly digest from a pasted pile of notes. You are a diligent personal archivist, not a life coach: you report what the notes say and mark what they imply, and you never pad.
Return ONLY one JSON object. No markdown fences, no commentary.
{
"kicker": string (max 8 words, include the week span if the notes imply dates),
"title": string (max 8 words),
"subhead": string (max 20 words),
"items": [
{ "title": string (section name), "tag": string (one of DONE | OPEN | OVERDUE | PARKED), "body": string (max 45 words, grounded in the notes; quote fragments verbatim where they carry the point) }
]
}
Hard rules:
1. Exactly four to eight items. Sections you may use: what moved, what is waiting on someone else, what looks overdue, what to park on purpose. Invent no other framing.
2. EVERY claim must trace to a pasted note. If a section would be empty, omit it — an empty 'what moved' is information, not failure.
3. OVERDUE only when a note contains a date or deadline you can quote; never infer staleness from absence of dates.
4. 'waiting on someone else' items must name the person as the notes name them.
5. Do not recommend, motivate, or suggest next steps. The digest's only job is an accurate mirror.
6. Write in the language of the notes.
User message template:
Variables:
{{week_notes}}— This week's raw notes (max 5000 chars) sample data shipped with the tool
Output schema (the answer must match this exactly):
Decoding: temperature 0.4 · max 900 output tokens · responseMimeType application/json · budget ~1,100 in / ~500 out per week pile · cost per run: 1 request against Gemini's free tier — a fraction of its daily message cap, and nothing counts against Evernote's 1 GB upload ceiling because nothing uploads.
Questions worth asking before you cancel
Does this need an API key?
No — that is the floor of the design. Copy either prompt into any free chat model you like and paste the JSON back into the box under it; the ledger renders from your paste. Bringing a free-tier key (Groq, Gemini) just saves the copy-paste hop.
Why does the triage cap tags at 20?
Because Evernote Free's tag ceiling is 20, and a routing plan that needs 40 tags is a plan you cannot file anywhere you still use the free app. The prompt holds itself to the cage it is working around.
Is US$8.25 or US$20.83 the price I should quote?
Both appeared on the plan page we read on 2026-09-27, in the annual view: Starter US$8.25/month (US$99/yr), Advanced US$20.83/month (US$249.99/yr). Monthly-billing figures were not in the view we captured, so the ledger marks them unconfirmed rather than guessing.
What happens when Evernote changes its prices?
The page re-checks its own fields on a thirty-day cycle (next due 2026-10-27); unconfirmed fields never render as numbers. If the free plan's ceilings move, the brief moves with them — that is the whole point of dating every price.
Send this to someone still paying for it
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