Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone
blog.instapaper.com
blog.instapaper.com
[0]: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2777-what-happens-after-yahoo... [1]: https://readability.com/
Pinterest receives value from the ongoing operation of Instapaper in the form of continued parsing improvements and aggregate information about links on the web, and that value is enough to justify our relatively small operating costs.
free supervision of extractors for web page content (people complain if the scraper doesn't work)
some notion of link quality
I see it as an insurance for us users: as long as a significant amount of users are paying keeping the service as-is is a valid alternative for the owners.
When it becomes free I fear that someone suddenly starts looking at it as a cost center, I mean: all the benefits you mention seems to be possible without operating an end-user service.
Disclaimer: not a paying Instapaper customer, but I am a paying lastpass customer and a paying google docs customer etc etc.
I can't honestly say that the paid-for services I use are more likely to remain available than my non-paid services.
The key factor appears to be a viable business model, but that's impossible to evaluate from the outside (and sometimes from the inside).
Thanks
This is a pretty empty claim without a minimum time frame. It would also be more convincing if it came from Ben Silbermann...
Hope you forgive the skepticism but I've seen too many start ups being acquired and happily singing the "Our buyer has full confidence in us and will let us operate with 100% independence" cliché quickly followed a few months later by "We are sorry to announce that we're shutting down".
> "..I just got something for free and .."
What you're saying is now that they got it for free they have no right to complain about the fear of it being unstable. Which is EXACTLY why people are having an issue here. They are fearing that the fact that it is free means it also won't be able to be relied upon and you just proved why they are saying that. If you pay for something you have some recourse. If it's 100% free for everyone and shuts down, well shit. Guess all of your stuff is gone and you have to go elsewhere.
Thanks so much for dropping into this thread. Would Pinterest be willing to open source non-competitive pieces of Instapaper's tooling, considering the user base is what is of value (monitoring parser and link quality)?
This doesn't look good.
That doesn't involve premium accounts but requires many many more users.. so maybe do a huge push by making the instapaper features free in a PR push, and work to get their active monthly users way up.
Do you think that's possible?
I thought I read that it was just a team of three, all of whom chose to move.
It seems Pocket(which recently started using their extension to politely spam Chrome start page with article suggestions) and Instapaper are in some sort of war of attrition while pinboard is happily chugging along.
Or they want to grow Instapaper at the expense of Pocket, and then do something else with it.
Disclaimer: I am a competitor to Instapaper and talk smack a lot.
> The value Instapaper provides to Pinterest in terms of parser capabilities and aggregate information about links is enough to justify the small operation cost of running the service.
Brian from Instapaper here. We will not be serving advertisements in your Instapaper queue. The value Instapaper provides to Pinterest in terms of parser capabilities and aggregate information about links is enough to justify the small operation cost of running the service.
I'm happy to answer any other questions you have.
Brian
How much did you grow since now, last acquisition and first acquisition?
I paid for Instapaper so that it could run in the interest of its users. If it's fully supported by Pinterest, then its value to users is secondary to the value of its data and technology to Pinterest.
Why can't I keep giving you money? I don't want any special features, just your undying loyalty.
All the other iOS apps I’ve tried are laughably crippled. One of the apps I tried (Pinswift) still opens all links in an embedded web view, which means I couldn’t easily log into any sites because I’d have to copy and paste the credentials and OTP manually (NYTimes, WaPost, GitHub, etc). This also means no ad blocking or other protections and functionality offered by the SafariViewController feature in iOS.
I’d also expect for $9.99 plus a $1.99 for “Premium Fonts” Pushpin for Pinboard to be excellent but it isn’t. It’s unstable and its share extension isn’t as flexible as Pinner’s.
That said, Pinboard is a good service. It cares about my privacy, which is very important to me, and has the features I need for a bookmarking service. It is not a read-later service. For example, the article caching features that it provides is web-only and isn’t available through the API so no third-party app can integrate it. This means there is no truly offline reading experience since I’d have to have access to the Pinboard website if I want to read a cached link.
EDIT: Windows would be the main win for me if a good client exists, as that's my main OS. I only use Ubuntu at work.
I’ll have to start looking for this, soon, however. I’m seriously considering switching. Another service that seems to have no native clients on Windows or Linux is Feedbin.
It used to be that one could find tons of native apps for Windows for pretty much anything. Now there’re hardly any for popular services. I’m not sure if this is because of Microsoft’s seemingly schizophrenia approach to their office APIs (is it MFC? Win32? WinForms? XAML? UWP? Something else?) and their lack of focus or just the iPhone and mobile computing’s “halo” effect.
The reading interface for Instapaper is much better. Pocket has more clients, browser plug ins, etc so you can take it anywhere (When I switched Instapaper Android wasn't available).
Both are lame when bookmarking things like github repos.
I really want these services to open up their engine so that I can write a plug in for displaying bookmarked gists or repos.
For iOS, I find the Instapaper app to be a lot better than Pocket. A ton of font options that don't rely upon paying the Premium subscription, and the UI is less obtrusive. I also like that when you share links from the Instapaper app, it sends the actual link. Pocket's app shares links as redirects, so everything shows up as a shorthand pocket.co/nnnnnn type of link. Both can have links added by an iOS share sheet, which is convenient. Pocket does have a nice feature in the app where it can refresh the article, in case you know what you're reading is outdate.
No Android devices, so no clue how it works on that platform.
The web experience is mostly equal, although Instapaper looks cleaner and still has more font options available than Pocket.
Neither platform is perfect with regards to transcribing articles. While I haven't done direct comparisons, it seems to me that Pocket falls back on displaying the original webpage more often when the site isn't a normal blog or news article. When it does transcribe the page down, it seems to include less non-article stuff(social media links, etc.) than Instapaper does. It seems to be a wash there.
For my own personal conclusion, I like Instapaper more, but Pocket works well enough.
The only downside is that a decent chunk of their content (~5%) is from Business Insider, and there is no way to mute/hide a source (News Republic offers this). But they've got plenty of good sources (NYT, New Yorker), and a pretty good recommendation algorithm.
Also - If you're looking for discovery/curation then you'd probably be interested in what I'm doing - GGather.com. Right now it's in private beta - but you can join on https://beta.ggather.com
Was a heavy Pocket user before that but their iPhone app was buggy in the sense that when I saved something from Safari to Pocket, sometimes it would save, other times it would not. It was literally hit or miss. Not sure if they have fixed that in a recent release or not.
The separation of concerns is useful for my mental model of what I intend to happen when I open each of these apps.
The product is very good though, it's been extremely useful for me as I use the London Underground a lot, where a signal is often not available and I don't use the wifi they have in stations - so being able to load all my instapaper articles beforehand and read them offline has been great
BTW, it is the greatest procrastination killer. Instead of reading HN articles during my work hours, I send them to my kindle and -- usually :-) -- never finish to read them. A great time saver!
I'm not saying they have to be integrated just that I might pay that much for a bunch of premium services if the price were bundled.... and the services were entirely focused on functionality of power users, privacy, and not ease of use, ads and eye candy.. ie pro users... ie vim keys.
I would love a whole bunch of services that had really good vim like short cut keys (yes I know gmail has it but not a lot other things do).
Maybe some of these guys like instapaper could do some sort of joint marketing/sales effort or sharing of users to stay in business.
Can't say I'd even use their service for free.
I had to go to my bank and report them for fraudulent charges so that the next however many charges wouldn't count against me.
Apparently that gets you downvotes on HN.