
Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone - jparise
http://blog.instapaper.com/post/152600596211
======
AdmiralAsshat
This smells like an app that will be shutting down in about six months.

~~~
bthdonohue
Brian 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
Hello, 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...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2777-what-happens-after-yahoo-
acquires-you) [1]: [https://readability.com/](https://readability.com/)

~~~
bthdonohue
I understand and appreciate the skepticism, however, the reason we're making
this change is because we want to provide the best experience for our users.

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.

~~~
reitanqild
For me one part of "growing up" in sw engineering has been that I have started
to want to pay reasonable amounts for things I use actively.

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.

~~~
canes123456
Being a service that charges money does not guarantee a longer life.

~~~
ChefDenominator
Guarantee? No. Improve the odds? Yes.

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rgbrenner
So 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.

~~~
EduardoBautista
This 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.

~~~
exBarrelSpoiler
At the very least, they should write less treacly Dear John letters to their
former customers

[http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com](http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com)

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emodendroket
Looking forward to Pinterest shutting Instapaper down in 2 years.

~~~
pgtruesdell
Hello Pinboard.

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idlewords
Hey there.

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gant
I 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
Just add a comment system - that would be a HN competitor I would love to use.

~~~
idlewords
Hah, that's an entertaining idea!

~~~
Terretta
Wait, wait, add the work "API token" tag filter first!

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mtmail
On 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?

~~~
bthdonohue
Hi 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

~~~
Sidnicious
Hi 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
The only way you can have an undying loyalty is by being the owner of the
company, that's how capitalism works.

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overcast
Our incredible journey towards offering our premium service for free, until
the two weeks shutdown notice.

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purple-dragon
Does anyone have experience to share re: Instapaper vs. Pocket (or something
better)?

~~~
kstrauser
I'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
Are 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.

~~~
mightykan
Unfortunately 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.

~~~
FreezerburnV
Do you know if there is any good software for windows and/or Linux (Ubuntu
specifically) for pinboard? Nothing seems to be actually good, and Pinner
seems to be the first client I've seen that actually looks good.

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.

~~~
mightykan
Sorry, I don’t. ReadKit on OS X is decent (and is the only native Mac app that
I could find that actually integrates the Pinboard API) but I don’t know of
anything else on other platforms.

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.

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russnewcomer
I'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.

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djhworld
I'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

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neves
Wow! 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!

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agentgt
I 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
Sounds a bit like an Office 365 subscription, making use of OneDrive, OneNote,
Outlook and Tasks/Teams. No blogging though.

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eruditely
Hey, 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.

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chiefalchemist
Mo users. Mo data harvesting. Mo money.

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michaelmrose
I 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.

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dmux
This doesn't really sound like it was their fault.

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mitchell209
Are you telling me people have to be responsible for their own money? The
horror.

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chadlavi
Already lost my business when they paywalled me out.

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frankquist
What do you mean?

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chadlavi
at 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
Not 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))

