
The next ten years of Instapaper - chmars
http://blog.instapaper.com/post/176732408411
======
jakobegger
Since they don't seem to bother actually sharing their ten year plan, let me
share what I want their ten year plan to be:

\- We're planning no new user visible features. Instapaper will continue to
work just the way you've grown to like it, and we're not planning to change
stuff around.

\- We're working on making text extraction even more reliable. Besides blog
posts and news articles, we hope to improve text extraction from PDFs, slide
decks or even twitter threads. Whatever textual content you find on the web,
with Instapaper you can save it for distraction free reading, now or later.

\- Our apps will see ongoing development to improve compatibility (eg. support
new devices/OS updates as they come out), but no major new features. Quality
assurance will be our top priority.

\- and last but not least, our goal is to establish a small, but profitable
company to keep the project alive! Besides the technical aspects, our new
business plan will make sure that we're thinking ahead and that we're never
caught off guard by something like the GDPR again.

~~~
anotherevan
\- Will work with ereader manufacturers to allow them to use Instapaper (like
Pocket works on Kobo).

------
_frog
It feels weird to me that they’re putting those monetisation hooks back in
without talking at all about the future of the product. I’ve used Instapaper
for many years now, and I’m more than happy to pay for a service that I get so
much value out of, but that said, Instapaper’s largely stagnated in recent
years, with very little in the way of major updates or improvements. I’d
really love to see even a rough roadmap that could give me some idea of where
they want to be say, a year from now, but right now I don’t have a ton of
confidence.

~~~
tptacek
Why do you want major updates and improvements? Are you a customer of
Instapaper's, or an investor hoping your dollars today pay off in a much
better product later? A thing I like about the service I use is that it _doesn
't_ add major new things regularly; it just does the thing I ask it to do and
gets out of the way.

~~~
wpietri
I'm in the same category. They said the plan is to "ensure Instapaper can
continue for the foreseeable future", which is all the feature I need.

I could believe they will think of other things I want besides continuing to
work well. But I don't want them to feel like they have to be on a feature
treadmill.

------
drexlspivey
I switched to emailthis after the EU fiasco.
[https://www.emailthis.me/](https://www.emailthis.me/)

You get a parsed html email with the article without the adds. It literally
supports every app there is for saving (you just share via email). You can
read it from any email client and easily share it with your friends. I also
use fastmail which has a great full text search so finding old articles is a
breeze. You can also do many cool stuff with IFTTT because again, it's just
email.

~~~
andrei_says_
What about images?

~~~
drexlspivey
Images are included, not video though.

------
lkurusa
Good to see the 6 months Premium for EU users, but I am still unconvinced; I
switched to Pocket after the GDPR fiasco, is there any reason to switch back?

~~~
pembrook
It’s clear that Pinterest management was behind the GDPR fiasco, and now that
Instapaper is independent again, they’re trying to make it right.

To me it’s a better product than pocket, reason enough for me to switch back.

~~~
cube2222
Why do you think it's a better product? (Not a user of any of them)

------
subbz
After all these comments stating that they changed to Pocket I find it
important to point out we also have an self-hosted and open source alternative
to these 2:

Wallabag ([https://wallabag.org/en](https://wallabag.org/en))

Unfortunately it's very hard to set Wallabag up without having access to
VirtualHosts.

~~~
o_____________o
Slim the server down so it fits on a lambda and include a serverless
definition to set it up in one line:

[https://github.com/serverless/serverless](https://github.com/serverless/serverless)

------
AJRF
Read-it-later software seems surprisingly hard to monetize given how few are
in the space. Pocket, Instapaper and Pinboard seem to be the only valid
players.

The ability to facilitate "archiving a webpage" seems to be simple, but read-
it-later software needs to be more than that to the modern internet user it
seems.

It needs to; \+ Save video and images \+ Most people require a TTS service of
sorts \+ Even more people want text-extraction (and boy-oh-boy this is hard)
\+ Cross-platform apps & syncing

Where are the big costs here? Is it;

1\. Scale (Syncing all that multimedia must be expensive) 2\. Talent (doubt
it's this all the teams seem to be extremely small teams) 3\. AI & Scraping
development (Most services are poor in their offerings here, not sure its
this)

I've been thinking about the space a LOT and started to try and develop some
pieces of software that eventually I hope people will be able to stitch
together into something great.

When i've observed problems like this before it seems that eventually a large
open source project comes along and kills the markets chance of generating any
money, and read-it-later services seem to fit in that fuzzily-defined-in-my-
head-only market segment.

------
jseliger
I subscribed. I don't need the premium features, but I also use Instapaper
just about every day and want the company to survive.

~~~
chmars
Same here. I don't even dare that by paying for a premium subscription, I lost
my 6-month trial period …

------
sidcool
Did I miss something or was there no mention of the plans for the next ten
years?

~~~
theDoug
You are correct.

So the plan seems that they are hoping up to $350 in revenue per Premium user
over that ten year span will cover it. Which seems …low.

~~~
jakobegger
35$ per user per year is pretty decent for a low touch app like Instapaper. At
that rate, they need just a few thousand subscribers per developer. I don't
know how big their team is, and where they work / what kind of salary they pay
themselves, and I have no clue how many users they have, but I'm pretty sure
there are ways to make the math work out.

------
_susanoo
Straight from their privacy policy [0]:

\-- Please note: To ensure easy account creation, minimal customer errors, and
reduced support inquiries, Instapaper accounts initially do not have
passwords. If left without a password, anyone can access your account if they
know or guess your username. \--

This sounds like a serious security issue if you ask me.

[0] = [https://www.instapaper.com/privacy](https://www.instapaper.com/privacy)

~~~
bthdonohue
Hey there – we started requiring passwords many years ago, but the service
originally launched without requiring a password or email address. You can
read more about it here:
[http://blog.instapaper.com/post/2318776738](http://blog.instapaper.com/post/2318776738)

~~~
_susanoo
I'm not sure how requiring a minimum password length of 1 character solves
anything. Just tried it out and apparently 'a' is an acceptable password.

The article hammers on accessiblity over security and I think you've taken
this too far. A minimum password length of 8 is not a 'strange requirement'.

~~~
diminoten
Password requirements don't really protect the business, they protect the
user, and if the user isn't interested in protecting their data, why should
the company force them to care?

~~~
wpietri
Yeah, I just don't see the risk here. I don't keep my old magazines in a safe.
They go under the coffee table, and then they go outside to the recycling bin.

~~~
sjs
In some countries what you read may be sensitive info for many people.

~~~
wpietri
In which case, I'm thinking people in those countries know enough to set a
password.

------
henryaj
Are there any decent alternatives to Instapaper? Pocket is the obvious one,
but doesn't have highlights (which I rely on).

~~~
r3bl
Wallabag: [https://www.wallabag.it/en](https://www.wallabag.it/en) (Link to
the hosted version, change .it to .org if you prefer to self-host.)

It contains highlighting, send-to-Kindle, decent mobile apps, and all the
other features you would usually rely on!

Feature-wise, no alternative compares to it.

The only problem: UI. It's not the UX (things are where you expect them to
be), but UI just looks... wrong. The same thing applies to their website(s) as
well.

~~~
corobo
I had a look into it while Instapaper was down and couldn't find any send-to-
Kindle feature - do you know where that's mentioned at all?

~~~
superlopuh
[https://github.com/cekage/wallindle](https://github.com/cekage/wallindle)

Needs a jailbroken Kindle...

~~~
corobo
Ah yeah that’s not happening. Instapaper it is :)

------
skiman10
Well this is kind of annoying. They gave out premium to everyone when
Pinterest bought them, but now that they are a private company again they took
away features from me that I was used to using as a free user. I get why, but
it still rubs me the wrong way. Reminds me of the PushBullet monetization
stuff[0].

[0] [https://blog.pushbullet.com/2015/11/17/introducing-
pushbulle...](https://blog.pushbullet.com/2015/11/17/introducing-pushbullet-
pro/)

------
drrob
As a UK user it's just nice to finally have it back. Good to know things are
still going swimmingly despite the GDPR setbacks.

------
q-base
I would have loved/expected a short explanation as to why GDPR compliance took
so long to achieve.

I really love Instapaper and use it a lot. Especially the send to kindle
feature. Luckily for them I did not stumble upon an easy 1:1 replacement.

But not even explaining the challenges seems quite a bit off and suspect. It
is not like I keep my health records there (at least to my knowledge :) )

~~~
bumholio
Possibly one of the worst cases of irrational GDPR fear. The fines would have
been significantly lower than the (irreversible?) loss of European market
share.

~~~
Sujan
It is impossible for fines ($ or €) to be lower than market share (% or number
of users).

Also, what you probably meant is still not possible: As Instapaper was free
under Pinterest, market share was connected to $0 of revenue. So any fine
would be greater than the revenue of the app's European customers.

~~~
bumholio
That's nitpicking on language, in context I am clearly referring to the
monetary value of the respective market share. That can be calculated even for
a zero revenue company, unless the plan all along was to operate Instapaper as
a non-profit and forever offer the service free.

------
jazzdog
How about making it anything less than painful to use on an iPad. Like, maybe
some of your developers can actually try to use it on an iPad? If this has
been fixed, I retract. I've moved on long ago.

------
charlietango592
Do they expect to have any EU user after being out 2 months? I've been
chatting with the support and I heard only the classic "soon".

~~~
qn0x
Funnily enough while the web service was unavailable to EU users (myself
included) their Android app worked just fine for me.

~~~
jplayer01
Are you sure? While I had access to old articles on my iOS app, I wasn't able
to add new ones, something I hadn't noticed until weeks later.

------
anotheryou
so full text search is payed again. i love that feature, but it's not worth 30
bucks a year to me.

------
aniket12
For someone who only wants a free service, which is better - Pocket or
Instapaper?

~~~
ReverseCold
Pocket is owned by Mozilla. Instapaper is (was?) owned by Pinterest.

(I think the choice is obvious :D)

Ideally though, you can host your own FOSS solution on a raspberry pi or
something. (Wallabag)

~~~
pwinnski
Instapaper is owned by the two people who signed this post. For 21 days now.

------
canuckintime
Meanwhile, Instapaper just killed their Apple Watch app:
[http://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/08/03/instapaper-apple-
wat...](http://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/08/03/instapaper-apple-watch-app-
removal/)

~~~
heavymark
I can't imagine any significant number of people were using it to justify
keeping it, but perhaps I'm wrong.

~~~
canuckintime
When Instapaper removes Apple Watch support it deletes the app from the watch
of everyone who installed the iPhone app update.

------
antjanus
Can someone compare Instapaper to Pocket for me? I'm just wondering how
they're different.

