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@m_eiman. InstaPaper.com does offer similar service, but not good enough. Besides the small headaches, the text-version does not provide images. What's even w

@m_eiman. InstaPaper.com does offer similar service, but not good enough. Besides the small headaches, the text-version does not provide images. What's even worse is the lack of support other encodings. Try this one in your instapaper and you'll understand what do I mean: http://news.sina.com.cn/w/2008-12-08/170516806326.shtml http://news.sina.com.cn/w/2008-12-08/170516806326.shtml That being said, you do raise a good point: how much shall we charge for the consumer version? Maybe it should be free while the API should cost some money.

m_eiman 18y ago
Speaking for myself and not for the general population, I'd say that you'll probably need to go freemium. A free basic service with for-pay extra features. Maybe you could do what Instapaper is doing and charge for mobile software and not the service? Maybe let basic users store five or so pages, and let paying users keep as many as they want? I tend to put quite a bunch of pages in my instapaper queue before reading them all at once. I guess you should spend a day or two to brainstorm a long list of features and let intended users rank them and tag them as "nice" vs "must have". Put the must haves in the free version, or most of them, and the nice ones in the paid category? I have no idea what the usual way of dividing features between versions is, but putting the must haves in the free version should help build user base. And when you've started using it, those nice features might start looking tastier. On the other hand, if all your needs are taken care of in the free version you're not as inclined to spend.. Better ask someone who knows this stuff instead :) $4 per month is more than I'd be willing to pay, and I consider myself fairly payment friendly - but I'm more in favour of one time payments than subscriptions.
- alexdong 18y ago
  m_eiman, yes, yes, this is a very good idea. We're in the middle of putting up a site so that people like you could play with it. stay tune.

m_eiman 18y ago

Speaking for myself and not for the general population, I'd say that you'll probably need to go freemium. A free basic service with for-pay extra features. Maybe you could do what Instapaper is doing and charge for mobile software and not the service? Maybe let basic users store five or so pages, and let paying users keep as many as they want? I tend to put quite a bunch of pages in my instapaper queue before reading them all at once. I guess you should spend a day or two to brainstorm a long list of features and let intended users rank them and tag them as "nice" vs "must have". Put the must haves in the free version, or most of them, and the nice ones in the paid category? I have no idea what the usual way of dividing features between versions is, but putting the must haves in the free version should help build user base. And when you've started using it, those nice features might start looking tastier. On the other hand, if all your needs are taken care of in the free version you're not as inclined to spend.. Better ask someone who knows this stuff instead :) $4 per month is more than I'd be willing to pay, and I consider myself fairly payment friendly - but I'm more in favour of one time payments than subscriptions.

alexdong 18y ago
m_eiman, yes, yes, this is a very good idea. We're in the middle of putting up a site so that people like you could play with it. stay tune.