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Pinboard's New Pricing Policy
- simi_ 12y ago> Pinboard Blog I think the actual blog post title might make for a better title. By the way, I just bought an account a couple of days ago, after flirting with the idea for more than a year. Pretty good timing I guess. Pinboard seems so far almost exactly how I imagined my perfect bookmarking service (and I'm a huge bookmarking nerd). I like and use the Pinboard Plus [0] Chrome extension because of its simplicity. 0: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pinboard-plus/mphdppdgoagghpmmhodmfajjlloijnbd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pinboard-plus/mphd...
- hudibras 12y ago> An astonishing number of people already believe that they're paying annually for Pinboard. I've always wondered about this. The subscription model is so ingrained nowadays that I cannot think of any other web service of any kind which uses a one-time fee.
- dchest 12y agoIt's not only a web services: I sometimes receive emails asking me to cancel the subscription for my desktop software, which is sold without subscription.
- lucaspiller 12y ago"I'm sorry to hear you no longer wish to continue your subscription for <your app>. Could I tempt you to continue at a special reduced rate of only $5/year?"
- interurban 12y agoMetafilter has a one-time fee ($5).
- Chris_Newton 12y agoIt’s definitely worth thinking about customers’ preconceptions in this area even if you do run a subscription service. Ours charges monthly, but the current month is the limit of any normal customer’s commitment. The first time we went out to an exhibition and met some prospective customers face-to-face, a disturbing proportion of them had assumed that because we charge monthly, we must have some minimum lock-in period of a year or more, like their mobile phone plan or broadband contract. This expectation that they had missed the long term lock-in somewhere in the small print was clearly costing us potential subscribers, even though our site simply said the price was X/month. If memory serves, we converted at least a couple of people on the spot as soon as we confirmed that this was not the case.
- eps 12y agoDamn, Maciej. - Isn't this somehow unfair to someone? - No. - Should I be worried? - Only in the broadest, existential sense. Thanks, totally made my day :)
- daGrevis 12y agoThis just forced me to finally buy a Pinboard account!
- buro9 12y agoShould I be worried? Only in the broadest, existential sense. Perfect. It's little touches like this that keep the service personal.
- sillysaurus3 12y agoI still can't figure out whether Pinboard is insane or genius for pricing it at ~$10/lifetime (or in this case $11/year). I've paid Dropbox about $480 now, and it's easily that valuable. But the amount of value I've derived from Pinboard is comparable. The value is "You'll never lose this note, idea, or tool ever again in your entire life. Even if it goes offline, you'll still have a starting point for remembering that-thing-you-saw-years-ago-and-want-again." There's a certain phenomenon in the gamedev industry that was discovered a few years ago. As you price something near zero, your sales increase more than linearly. You'd think that if you drop the price of a game from $50 to $5, you'd get 10x the sales. But in fact, you end up with much more. I wonder if something similar happens for Pinboard.
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- bookofawesome 12y agoLike people would pay anywhere near $400 for a bookmarking service (except you). Come back down to reality.
- sillysaurus3 12y agoWell, I didn't pay Dropbox $400. I paid it $9.99/mo. Then a long time went by. Okay, maybe it was a little silly to imply that it was worth $400 over the course of one's lifetime. But I have to live up to my namesake once in awhile. Consider this: What if Pinboard was pay-what-you-want? I wonder if the average revenue would be closer to $40/person than to $10/person. Or, if it's still the same average price, I wonder if it would've resulted in higher total volume (many more sales). It's interesting to realize that, barring some catastrophe, I'll be using both Dropbox and Pinboard in 10 years. That means I'll have paid Dropbox $1,200 and Pinboard $10 (or $110 after the pricing change.) Maybe that's the right price point. I don't know. Monetization is a weird and fascinating subject to me. There's a lot of counterintuitive aspects to it. In particular, it's possible to drive customers away by trying to nickel-and-dime them. Yet it's also possible to turn your back on a lot of money without realizing it. Patio11's gone into this in more eloquent detail than I ever will.
- sireat 12y agoI think I waited about 3 years since first hearing about Pinboard (here on HN no less) until finally making the jump from Delicious. The bookmarking speed difference is amazing.
- acqq 12y agoTo those who still don't use the service: use the possibility: sign up in this year, you can use than the service as long as it exists. Maciej, in case you read here, thanks a lot for a beautiful product. I've already decided to pay you yearly. And not because I want to support you (although I wish people would support more such operations like yours) but because I really find your service useful and inexpensive. I see sillysaurus3 in his comment here also finds a huge value in using Pinboard for the amount paid. As I already wrote "as long as it exists," Maciej, do you do anything to change the answer to this FAQ entry of yours? "Q: What happens if the guy who runs Pinboard gets hit by a bus? A: The bus is likely to be fine. They don't go very fast and are designed with passenger safety in mind."
- oneeyedpigeon 12y ago"To those who still don't use the service: use the possibility: sign up in this year, you can use than the service as long as it exists." One side-effect - almost certainly unintentional, from what I know of Maciej - of the change is that a surge in subscriptions might occur as people take advantage. If I hadn't already paid, I certainly would now. I originally signed up more-or-less on a whim, and I haven't taken full advantage of pinboard by any means. Still, I might now and, if I find it really useful, I'm sure I'll go ahead and pay for the annual sub.
- jarek 12y agoTwist: he needs money to pay off his Christmas shopping credit card bill
- acqq 12y agoThe real worth of the service for me was the archiving functionality which was always to be paid yearly. Instead of saving the web pages locally on my computer and copying the links in some documents I can know now that they are safely duplicated by Pinboard and that I can describe them, give them the tags and then later easily find. And all that for just USD 25 per year, which I find a reasonable price. I'd certainly spend more of my time wen maintaining the same myself.
- phodo 12y agoI will gladly pay and in the future keep paying whatever is asked to keep this service running. I get so much value out of pinboard - personally and professionally - that I've felt that I've definitely underpaid relative to value received. I currently have 4,206 articles across 924 tags, accumulated over the past several years. In Nir Eyal's terms, webpages are now a trigger to use the service, which yields pretty high engagement on my end. I basically bookmark with zero friction and effort now. It's led to a more enjoyable web experience. For various reasons, I find it more useful than all the other bookmark / read it later [1] type services. Between the web bookmarklets and the new iOS extension to archive items directly from the action sheet, it's even more useful. So tldr ... thank you, Maciej, for a great service. [1] I do use Evernote and others regularly, but their use cases, when it comes to archiving/bookmarking content, are more niche / specific (although they excel in other areas).
- platz 12y ago43,000 bookmarks and 15,000 tags over 4 years. Sometime I wonder if I'm bookmarking too much.
- drsintoma 12y agoCan someone give me some hints about pinboard's advantages over, lets say, delicious? I know people love it over here but from what I've read it seems to be more about the openness of the creator that the product itself.
- jlarocco 12y agoI've been using Pinboard since 2011. I switched from Delicious after Yahoo started screwing it up. The things I like about Pinboard: The UI is simple, intuitive, and works on my computers, my iPad, my phone, etc. It doesn't do a million other things and lose focus on bookmarking. It doesn't integrate with Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and the rest. It doesn't rollout new changes every other week. I'm not worried about the site getting sold to a different company and being ruined. I'm not worried about the current owner deciding he needs to change things up and ruining it. It's always online. In the past, even when getting pounded by new sign ups (i.e. after Delicious has a new release) the site's stayed online. I think the worst I've seen is he throttled or disabled the importing tasks for a little bit. It charged me up front instead of making money off of me on the backend by selling my data to advertisers.
- bsg75 12y ago> It doesn't integrate with Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and the rest. You can link a Twitter account, for one advantage of using the Twitter favorite mechanism to automatically bookmark (optionally archive) in Pinboard from any Twitter client.
- sillysaurus3 12y agoI started using Delicious, and then Yahoo completely changed the service. Utterly. It broke a bunch of features. Switched to Pinboard and never looked back. And it's stayed just as rock-solid as it was on day one. Also, if you're using Delicious to archive some personal bookmarks, I trust those to be on Maciej's servers more than Yahoo servers. I don't know what kind of privacy settings Delicious has, but even if it's as painless as Pinboard's, I wouldn't really trust it. In particular, all of your bookmarks will certainly be analyzed on Yahoo servers. Whereas I trust Maciej not to perform experiments on random people's bookmarks.
- accolade 12y agoI like Pinboard.in, but hate the gushing fanboy-ism on Hacker News. It's almost embarrassing to read. There are many other good bookmarking services. Pinboard is one of them. Stop treating it like its a religion.
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- phillmv 12y agoMaciej is just a cool guy, offering great value and excellent rants on twitter.
- imiric 12y agoCare to share these other good bookmarking services?
- mcherm 12y agoI would be delighted to hear about other good bookmarking services. And I am a potential customer seeing as how I currently pay pinboard for archiving even though I don't really care about archiving - I just want to be sure that it is profitable. I have looked at (and used) delicious and find it to be substantially inferior. So, can you recommend some competitors?
- accolade 12y agoPocket has become habitual for me. It saves and archives my articles and it's ubiquitous on every platform. Flipboard is also surprisingly good. Other options are Raindrop.io and Dragdis - sort of the same, sort of different. I like Pinboard BTW... I like it less because of the sucky fanboy-ism on Hacker News though.
- mahouse 12y agoI wish they had a free tier with ads.
- sillysaurus3 12y agoI'd stop using it instantly. EDIT: Wow. Apparently a bunch of other people would, too. A pizza costs, what, $18? Pinboard is $11/year.
- mahouse 12y agoThere's a huge psychological barrier when buying things like this one. Even if it costed $0.99. (Think about apps.)
- sillysaurus3 12y agoWhile that's true, advertising isn't valuable unless the advertisers know something about you. And subjecting my personal bookmarks to data analysis isn't a line I'd be willing to cross. Once you use it for a few years, your thousands of bookmarks reveal quite a lot about you.
- johnpowell 12y agoBack when I was using Del.ic.ous a lot I was in college and really bored I stalked a few people on Del.ic.ous just to see what data I could gather. The first person that followed me I decided to look into. They posted a link to their grandmothers obituary and from there I was able to get their real name and where they were from.. And pretty much knowing everything about their location to where they applied for jobs was easy.
- acqq 12y agoYou're not the potential client then, everything is OK. He can run his business how he likes it, and that includes his decision not to target the maximum possible number of free users.
- wodenokoto 12y agoWhat does it give me that I don't get from pocket?
- jarek 12y agoA non-VC-funded service where users are the customers
- eli 12y agoThat feels like a fairly abstract benefit
- jarek 12y ago— Delicious users, circa '07 Though certainly if you don't mind switching services every three or five years it's a smaller factor.
- mcherm 12y agoI hope this also increases the profitability of the site. I am always somewhat worried when a site I depend on has a questionable business model. (When income only covers operating costs if the site is growing, that's questionable and with the old pricing model that was the case for all but the archive customers.)
- jimmcslim 12y agoI saw Maciej give a keynote at Web Directions South a few years ago... absolutely brilliant; the guy has a sense of humour dryer than the Atacama Desert :-)
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- baldfat 12y agoWell never used the site before but after reading the comments I signed up. Thanks for the heads up on a better service then what I was using.
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- AndrewDucker 12y agoMy main issue with Pinboard is that it doesn't autofill all of your tags if you have a large number of them. This is why I've ended up stuck with Delicious, which does do so. A shame, as other than that Pinboard is a superior service. But tag autocomplete on my complete list of tags is a deal-breaker for me.
- WimLeers 12y agoIf you use the Pinboard bookmarklet, there is autocomplete functionality that works just fine.
- AndrewDucker 12y agoNope. It has a maximum number of tags that it will use for autocompletion. If you have a couple of thousand tags then it only uses the most popular ones.
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