Tech Friday: Another security breach along with a price increase triggered my reevaluation of Lastpass, SmallPDF and Evernote
Posted By RichC on October 6, 2017
As a free user and then paying Premium LastPass customer for years, the 2017 price increase inched out of my comfort zone this week. It is not that the password managing product with added features is bad, it is just that the significant price bump ($12 to $24/yr) leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Priced at $12/yr was tolerable and I would have likely continued it, but doubling the price if I’m not using all the features is hard to swallow (encrypted storage would be nice if I need another cloud service).
In that same realm, I’m a paying customer of Evernote and the PDF converting product Smallpdf that I’m cancelling; they both renew this month. SmallPDF is a great timesaver for a couple of work related projects, but at $48/yr … it is overpriced for my needs (PDF conversion and compression can be done in other ways). I’m sure the companies struggle with how to set prices for their services, but consumers need to evaluate the ongoing cost of lightly used software and apps too.
Evernote is a full featured archiving product that if used might be worth the $69/year — but in my case it just duplicates other ways that I clip and save content. It is not my "go-to" app for saving notes and articles. *Evernote’s partnership with the Wall Street Journal for clipping WSJ articles is great though!
Combined with the "rethinking" of online services is the security aspect of it all. I’m already uncomfortable with cloud-based services collecting my data and storing my content … and due to the number of breaches we continue to read about, having more at risk doesn’t help. Besides the recent Equifax fiasco, Yahoo disclosed just this week that their earlier announced security breach of 1/3 of accounts (1 Billion users) was actually ALL 3 Billion accounts … that is "every single Yahoo account."
We need to rethink how we protect our information since it is obviously not safe in someone else’s hands.
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