It sounds like they're trying to extract as much money as possible from a SaaS subscription service that's no longer actually paying any devs.

From my perspective as a one-time (but no longer) paying user of evernote - WTF am I paying for monthly if not to support a dev team?

Seriously - I get that there are infra costs for some of the services, and I wouldn't mind paying those costs plus a reasonable upcharge, but I'm sure as fuck not going to pay a company $100+ a year subscription to store under a GB of data.

So now I host bookstack and I pay backblaze ~$0.22/m to back up all my notes, which is much closer to real costs for these services if they're not under development.

Genuine question, why not use a free Git service or something

I pay for Sourcehut now, but until recently I was using a free private GitHub account to sync my notes in Obsidian. It works fine and cost me nothing (at least nominally).