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Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone
- mtmail 10y agoOn the one hand I like new free features, especially the search. On the other hand Instapaper got acquired by Pinterest (http://blog.instapaper.com/post/149374303661 http://blog.instapaper.com/post/149374303661) and if they no longer make money from premium subscriptions and the service is ads-free, then how will they generate revenue? Selling publishers premium spots in my reading queue?
- idlewords 10y agoEither Pinterest is interested in running Instapaper at a loss, or they've found a way to make this financially worth their while. 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.
- visarga 10y agoBrian said: > 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.
- bthdonohue 10y agoHi there, 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
- mtmail 10y agoI'm looking forward to features like finding related articles, a https://longreads.com/ https://longreads.com/ like portal or more customizable weekly digests (lately it's all US politics which I don't care about). That said the usual 'click on read later, read article on the train' use-case works very well for me, no complains.
- AdamN 10y agoTry out https://factr.com https://factr.com - we're building out a concept called Streams which will help with digests and finding all the information on a given topic.
- Happpy 10y ago"I'm happy to answer any other questions you have." How much did you grow since now, last acquisition and first acquisition?
- bthdonohue 10y agoWell I meant specifically with respect to going free. As a policy, we do not publish usage numbers.
- msh 10y agoWhat are you using this aggravate information for?
- bthdonohue 10y agoTo better understand news and trending links on the web.
- wmeredith 10y agoSo it's like a human-powered spider to Pinterest?
- Sidnicious 10y agoHi Brian, 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.
- notgood 10y agoThe only way you can have an undying loyalty is by being the owner of the company, that's how capitalism works.
- emodendroket 10y agoLooking forward to Pinterest shutting Instapaper down in 2 years.
- pgtruesdell 10y agoHello Pinboard.
- idlewords 10y agoHey there.
- gant 10y agoI just subscribed. Very nice and simple service, love it. The only bad thing I can say is that the "popular" tab seems to be HN delayed by half a week or so.
- clydethefrog 10y agoJust add a comment system - that would be a HN competitor I would love to use.
- idlewords 10y agoHah, that's an entertaining idea!
- Terretta 10y agoWait, wait, add the work "API token" tag filter first!
- utku_karatas2 10y agoAn HN with longer attention span and without the haste. Come to think of it that would be really sweet.
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- purple-dragon 10y agoDoes anyone have experience to share re: Instapaper vs. Pocket (or something better)?
- kstrauser 10y agoI'm a huge fan of Pinboard. I like that it has a clear I-am-the-customer profit model, and it's performed flawlessly for me for several years now.
- untog 10y agoAre there apps that work with Pinboard? I'd like to support it, but I want to be able to background sync my saved stuff to my phone, like I do with Pocket.
- midgetjones 10y agoThere are several third party apps - I'm using Pinner, and it means I can save pages on the go from the usual share menu, and of course access my saved links.
- kstrauser 10y agoSure. Pinner for iOS looks good, works well, and has a share extension to allow you send pages from Safari directly to Pinboard. I like Spillo for macOS for the same reasons.
- mightykan 10y agoUnfortunately there are no good iOS apps for it. The only decent one, Pinner, decided, inexplicably, to drop iOS 9 support as soon as iOS 10 was released. iOS 9 is still fully supported by Apple. (Using iOS 10 isn’t an option for me for now). The iOS 9 version’s share extension still has a few bugs that completely block the third-party apps’ UI when adding URLs. Also the Pinner developer never responds to any support requests. I’ve tried sending him emails and hit him up on Twitter. He is completely silent. 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.
- AdmiralAsshat 10y agoThis smells like an app that will be shutting down in about six months.
- robbyking 10y agoMy first thought was to comment and say how sad I'd be if Instapaper shut down (I'ma premium subscriber), but in all honesty, my Instapaper queue feels more like of a burden than something I look forward to.
- notgood 10y agoThey should throw machine learning at it and send you the best summaries they can, that may reduce the "burden" feeling. Or maybe a way to automatically set an expiration for each link
- jtrtoo 10y agoEither Pocket or Insta should do more to surface previously saved (yet unread) stories. Pocket preferably as I'm a customer of theirs :)
- bthdonohue 10y agoBrian from Instapaper here. We have no plans to shut the app down, and a big part of the value the app provides (parser improvements, aggregate information on links) requires the ongoing operation of the service.
- AdmiralAsshat 10y agoHello, Brian! I hope you will take my skepticism in good humor. While I would delight in Instapaper's prolonged availability, I trust you are aware of the widespread perception that acquisition is where startups go to die [0], to say nothing of the fact that some of Instapaper's competitors have also fallen to the wayside [1]. The final red-light comes from the tendency to make services free right before they shut down, #1 as a last-ditch growth mechanism, and #2 as a means to eliminate any legal recourse should the service suddenly shut down. [0]: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2777-what-happens-after-yahoo-acquires-you https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2777-what-happens-after-yahoo... [1]: https://readability.com/ https://readability.com/
- chadlavi 10y agoAlready lost my business when they paywalled me out.
- frankquist 10y agoWhat do you mean?
- chadlavi 10y agoat some point in the past they were free, then to continue the normal service you had to sign up for a paid plan. So I stopped using their service. This is a "too little too late" for me as far as my customer experience goes. Apparently that gets you downvotes on HN.
- mtmail 10y agoNot sure what you mean. I'm a non-paying user from almost day 1 (oldest article from 2011). At no point was I forced to upgrade to paid plan. Did you use a third-party app maybe? Those only worked with premium accounts (http://blog.instapaper.com/post/3208433429 http://blog.instapaper.com/post/3208433429)
- st3v3r 10y agoSounds like they didn't lose much, as you left when they tried to get you to pay for what you were using. If you weren't paying them, can you really say they lost your business?
- russnewcomer 10y agoI'm hoping this is a 'Halo Car' kind of project for Pinterest. Instapaper has, I'd guess, a relatively large, legacy subscriber base, and their parsing and read-it-later tech is pretty mature. Hopefully, it's a product that they use for development of features to see if they are useful into the main Pinterest product, and so it stays around instead of just getting killed in 6 months.
- rgbrenner 10y agoSo what's the plan here. Just two months since Pinterest acquired them, they've shutdown Instaparser, moved their team across the country (literally: NY to SF.. I wonder how many employees quit instead), discontinued Premium--their sole source of revenue(?), and committed to no-ads... sounds like they have no monetization strategy at all anymore. This doesn't look good.
- codemac 10y agoMy thought is that pinterest has a solid model for monetization for people who bookmark & read things they find on the internet. 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?
- SloopJon 10y ago> I wonder how many employees quit instead I thought I read that it was just a team of three, all of whom chose to move.
- bthdonohue 10y agoBrian from Instapaper here. It was three of us, and two came along with the acquisition. We all agreed to it before making the decision.
- kobayashi 10y agoHi Brian, would you PLEASE consider increasing the maximum read speed in Instapaper. Pocket's much speedier maximum read speeds (with iOS' great Alex voice) are a huge pull that I can't leave behind.
- EduardoBautista 10y agoThis is the kind of business model the SF tech scene encourages. People are starting companies to be acquired, not to create a business that stands the test of time.
- michaelmrose 10y agoI stopped paying for their service as I was broke and they kept billing my account leading to several insufficient funds fees on an overdrawn account that they wouldn't stop billing. Can't say I'd even use their service for free.
- dmux 10y agoThis doesn't really sound like it was their fault.
- mitchell209 10y agoAre you telling me people have to be responsible for their own money? The horror.
- michaelmrose 10y agoI canceled my service and they continued to bill me for a monthly service I had asked to be canceled even when I was threatening legal action. 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.
- michaelmrose 10y agoI canceled my service and they continued to bill me for a monthly service I had asked to be canceled even when I was threatening legal action. 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.
- michaelmrose 10y agoStopped paying for it like I told them I didn't require their services any more because I needed that money to pay my mortgage if that wasn't clear.
- agentgt 10y agoI would probably pay ~$10 for some combined services of blogging, link saving, todo list management, ad removal, photo storage, maybe even email etc. (posthaven, pinboard, asana, etc). 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.
- dilemma 10y agoSounds a bit like an Office 365 subscription, making use of OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook and Tasks/Teams. No blogging though.
- rahimnathwani 10y agoHave you tried sandstorm?
- overcast 10y agoOur incredible journey towards offering our premium service for free, until the two weeks shutdown notice.
- neves 10y agoWow! I'm a premium subscriber and really love the send to kindle feature. I always read articles on my bed with good lightening. 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!
- djhworld 10y agoI've been an instapaper free user for quite a few years, I feel bad about not chucking them a few quid. 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
- eruditely 10y agoHey, i'm a user that is interested in seeing the continuing success of instapaper, do you have any other ways to generate revenue? I'm interested in the services success and that of the people behind them, so i'm a bit worried with this move, actually. I wasn't a paying customer, but I could have been.
- chiefalchemist 10y agoMo users. Mo data harvesting. Mo money.