

Instapaper Subscriptions (beta) - inm
http://www.instapaper.com/subscription

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ghshephard
Didn't even think twice about this - I am _always" clicking on "Read Later" -
and then making sure I sync up with my iPad and/or iPhone before walking home.
Then, throughout the day, whenever I have downtime, I get caught up on all the
articles.

In fact, there are a few times when I'm just buried in the screen Spam, that I
just give up and hit "Read Later", knowing that the article will be cleaned up
for me (Kind of like Safari's reading screen)

Love the $1/month charge. I have zero reason not to continue this
indefinitely. I would have gone as $3/month without hitting my "Hmm, let's
think about this point" - though I suspect I would have paid as much as
$4/month before I considered not subscribing. $5/month is over my pain point.

As a side note - the WSJ has basically established my "levelling" indicator
for what I consider fair value for a subscription. They charge me $155/12
months or about $13/month - with content syncing to my iPad or viewable
through the Web Browser.

So, when I purchase monthly content or service subscriptions, I mentally ask
my myself - what percentage of a WSJ subscription this is. I'd say that
Instapaper is worth about 1/3 of the WSJ.

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dotBen
I'm surprised Marco is billing $1/month in 3 month intervals... I'd have just
billed $12/year.

$12 is hardly a large payment chasm for a customer, particularly if you've
already told them that they're not going to get anything particularly extra
for their subscription and they're still interested.

But it also makes the fixed-fee on the transaction a lower %age of the total
sale and of course from a cash-flow perspective you have a full 12 months
income in the bank now.

~~~
stevefink
Don't forget, Marco is not shy to charge $4.99 for Instapaper in the App
Store. I do not have the statistics right now to back it up (although I'm sure
a few Google queries could), but I'm fairly confident that's above the average
price for an app.

~~~
seancron
The iPhone app also has some value to it that makes it worth the $4.99, e.g.,
250 article capacity, iPad compatible, and it remembers your position.

The only benefit subscribing gives to you right now is being able to hide ads,
which people can already do for free, and the warm, fuzzy feeling you get from
supporting Instapaper's development.

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edash
I love the honesty here:

"What are the benefits?

Right now? Almost nothing, except knowing that you are supporting the
Instapaper service’s operation and future feature development."

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stevefink
$1/mo to support one of my most used services is a no brainer. I hope others
feel the same way - Marco is going indie and he's definitely getting my $1/mo
to support his new full time business venture.

~~~
robchez
I honestly would have paid $5-$10/month for Instapaper. It is by far the most
used app I have on my iPhone.

I wish Marco the best of luck, and can't wait to see what new features he
comes up with.

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mattmaroon
I'll subscribe gladly if they fix the cron that emails articles to my Kindle.
That thing never works. Sometimes I go tell it to send the articles manually,
sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn't and I have to download a .mobi.

It's worth some amount of money to not even know what a .mobi file is.

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dmix
Instapaper on my Kindle is well worth $10/month.

I used to skim all the long articles I came across, now I read them all. The
longer, well thought out ones are some of the best.

If he released a more native Kindle integration, I'd definitely pay for it.

~~~
harisenbon
I fully agree. I've gotten so much use out of my instapaper/kindle integration
that it's mind-boggling.

If I recall correctly, they do have an option where they'll send instapaper to
your kindle account every day. However, the free kindle account doesn't
support automatic delivery, so you have to pay amazon their delivery fee.

I'm outside the states, so the $2 per instapaper or whatever it is just isn't
worth it to me. At the end of every day I just download all the files I've
collected to my kindle with the USB cable, and read on the train ride home.

~~~
ews
Same situation, but what I usually do is to go to instapaper.com/kindle on my
kindle browser to get the last version of my read-later document on my way to
work every morning. No need of USB and I can use it in situations like right
before getting into a plane.

The kindle browser kind of sucks (now, I am sure they will put more work into
that), but I have that URL as the first entry on my bookmarks menu.

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ja27
Whenever I see a low donation / price like this, I think of Shoemoney's post
about Amazon Wish Lists. His basic argument is that you should provide a way
for people to give you a wide range of money. I'm sure that some people will
gladly pay Marco $3/quarter but there might be a couple people that might
gladly buy him a new $100+ gadget.

[http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/12/23/income-from-donations-
am...](http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/12/23/income-from-donations-amazon-wish-
lists-rock/)

~~~
pmcginn
Exactly.

Well, that and I'm sick of everything in the goddamned world being a
subscription service now. Can't you do it like Pandora and make a big,
obvious, ONE TIME PAYMENT, WILL NOT RENEW option?

Or better yet, just give me an empty box so I can pay you a few years worth of
"subscription" at once and not think about it again. I'm sick of having a
million monthly charges on my credit card.

Take my money, please.

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jstatus
Excellent. I'm happy to support one of my favorite services. Instapaper is one
of the few apps (on iPad for me) that have actually improved the quality of my
daily life -- how often can you say that about an app?

Specifically, it's retraining my brain to slow down, go deeper, and think
critically.

My only concern would be rewarding the content producer, because I often skip
the web page all together.

Perhaps integrating Flattr's API for those domains that have it set up?

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blasdel
Previously it would have been kind of a dick move to make alternate reader
apps, but maybe now he could perhaps support an official API for subscribers

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oziumjinx
I don't even see an option to pay for any kind of service (logged in or not).
Did i miss the link somewhere?

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lotusleaf1987
Click the thread's link: <http://www.instapaper.com/subscription>

Then click on the Paypal 'subscribe' logo right in the middle of the screen.

~~~
carbon8
You also need to be logged in, otherwise it redirects to the home page.

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jfb
I use pinboard for my "read it later" functionality, but I'd switch to
Instapaper if it could deliver to my Kindle account (I don't use a Kindle, but
do use the software on my iPad). I'm assuming it's an Amazon limitation that
means auto-delivery only works on the Kindle hardware, no?

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martingordon
NYTimes reported that Instapaper has 800,000 registered users and 200,000
regular users. If every regular user signed up at $1/month, Marco would be
pulling in $2.4M. Even if it's only a quarter of the users, that's still a
nice chunk of change.

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evgen
As soon as there is a non-PayPal option I am there. I know why this is
currently the only option, but maybe someone from one of the many
subscription-billing startups that haunt HN should send Marco and email and
offer him a deal... :)

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TechStuff
I'm not sure how much it's worth but I was happy to subscribe for $1 and sent
a separate gift via PayPal for $10.

Go get 'em Marco!

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gleb
I'd pay for Kindle synchronization to actually work. Mine hasn't in a week or
so.

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yan
At $3/3mo, I just signed up without thinking about it. I love instapaper.

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jaybol
Definitely worth the $1/month and happy to support such a great product

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lotusleaf1987
I will pay even more ($30/year) if Instapaper could somehow allow for cross-
browser bookmark syncing a la XMarks. It seems like once XMarks is gone, there
will be a huge void in the market. Maybe Instapaper can add some more features
to fill in this gap.

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Zev
As-is, Instapaper isn't a bookmarking service, though. Its a reading service.
It strips away the unnecessary crap and formats text nicely, so you can focus
on reading.

~~~
StavrosK
Many people seem to be mistaking Instapaper for bookmarking. I get "why should
I use historious over Instapaper?" a lot, even though one is a "to read" list
and the other is a bookmarking service.

Ironically, I also get "why should I pay for historious when Instapaper is
free?" a lot as well. Looks like I'll be getting that less often now...

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gcb
What's the advantage of that over a delicious tag "read_later", that i've been
using for years?

delicious work on all browsers (natively), iphone, android.

well, not for epub readers without a one line cron job on my desktop... but
again, it works with android :)

~~~
booticon
Two completely different services. Instapaper will bookmark articles to read
later, and cut out everything except the text. One downside is that it doesn't
seem to be able to handle multi-page articles, however some sites have a
single page view (or "printer friendly").

The killer feature in my book is the iOS app. It's a universal app, and will
sync your article progress across your iOS devices. I _love_ this — perfect
for, e.g., reading part of an article on your iPhone while in line at the
bank, then going home and picking up where you left off on your iPad.

