
Pinboard's New Pricing Policy - hboon
https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/11/new_pricing_policy/
======
eps
Damn, Maciej.

    
    
      - Isn't this somehow unfair to someone?
      - No.
    
      - Should I be worried?
      - Only in the broadest, existential sense.
    

Thanks, totally made my day :)

------
acqq
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.

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
"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.

~~~
acqq
The 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.

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simi_
> 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/mphd...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pinboard-
plus/mphdppdgoagghpmmhodmfajjlloijnbd)

~~~
hboon
Thanks. I hadn't notice that. Modified the title.

------
buro9

        Should I be worried?
        
        Only in the broadest, existential sense.
    

Perfect. It's little touches like this that keep the service personal.

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hudibras
> 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
It'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
"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?"

------
jimmcslim
I 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 :-)

------
baldfat
Well 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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phodo
I 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
43,000 bookmarks and 15,000 tags over 4 years. Sometime I wonder if I'm
bookmarking too much.

------
mcherm
I 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.)

------
AndrewDucker
My 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
If you use the Pinboard bookmarklet, there is autocomplete functionality that
works just fine.

~~~
AndrewDucker
Nope. 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.

------
drsintoma
Can 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.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I 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.

~~~
yuhong
I don't think it is owned by Yahoo anymore.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Or whoever. If it's a free service, it's subject to monetization.

~~~
yuhong
Why does it matter that much though? It was other issues that made Delicious
fail, including that Yahoo sucked at acquisitions back then (they have since
improved).

~~~
sillysaurus3
Depends what you're bookmarking. Some people value their privacy. A
bookmarking service probably knows almost as much about your political
affiliations, your sexual orientation, etc as Facebook or Google does, after
you use it for a couple years. I trust Maciej not to exploit that information.

So it's not really about whether another bookmarking service can deliver or
not, for me. It's whether they're faithful steward.

------
sireat
I 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.

------
wodenokoto
What does it give me that I don't get from pocket?

~~~
jarek
A non-VC-funded service where users are the customers

~~~
eli
That feels like a fairly abstract benefit

~~~
jarek
— Delicious users, circa '07

Though certainly if you don't mind switching services every three or five
years it's a smaller factor.

~~~
eli
I'm still using delicious.

~~~
jarek
Ah, so you're the one! ;)

~~~
eli
Indeed! :)

I may well give in to Pinboard while it's still a lifetime rate, but
apparently my needs are so simple that the delicious drama didn't really faze
me.

------
daGrevis
This just forced me to finally buy a Pinboard account!

------
sillysaurus3
I 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.

~~~
fmavituna
A Pinboard user here. When I signed up I hoped there would be nice browser
integration but it's just not there. UX for me is just rubbish compared to
native bookmarking or to even old delicious extensions.

Honest question, why Pinboard is any better than using integrated Chrome
bookmarks sync feature? (ignoring the archive feature of Pinboard)

~~~
sillysaurus3
Hm, would you expand on what you disliked about the integration? You're using
the bookmarklet, right? I just click on "pin this" whenever I want to save the
current webpage, and click on "my pinboard" whenever I want to look for a
bookmark.

The killer feature for me is being able to type in a description for each
bookmark, because later on you can search by any word in that description.

I've given up on tagging anything though.

~~~
kelsol
Was definitely for me too, been lately using fetching.io for the same thing
but without having to bookmark. No integration though with pinboard yet

------
mahouse
I wish they had a free tier with ads.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I'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
There's a huge psychological barrier when buying things like this one. Even if
it costed $0.99. (Think about apps.)

~~~
sillysaurus3
While 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
Back 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.

