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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't have a statistical survey, but I have anecdotal evidence of paid services going away, increasing in price dramatically, or remaining the same. Same with free services.
I can't honestly say that the paid-for services I use are more likely to remain available than my non-paid services.
The key factor appears to be a viable business model, but that's impossible to evaluate from the outside (and sometimes from the inside).
Would you mind elaborating on how Pinterest derives value from your "aggregate information about links on the web"? What types of data do you/they glean through Instapaper?
That's quite interesting, are you using Instapaper to allow you to get more expansive testing on the parsing technology before rolling in the main product or are they reasonably lockstep?
How I wish Pinterest saw some value in keeping Fleksy - the keyboard app they acquired, updated. It is/was one of the best 3rd party keyboards out there, but has gotten buggy with newer iOS.
Hi Brian, I currently use pocket, why should I use Instapaper instead, is there any differentiation? I also receive the Instapaper weekly emails, which I love for the curation of top stories. Thanks.
This is a pretty empty claim without a minimum time frame. It would also be more convincing if it came from Ben Silbermann...
Hope you forgive the skepticism but I've seen too many start ups being acquired and happily singing the "Our buyer has full confidence in us and will let us operate with 100% independence" cliché quickly followed a few months later by "We are sorry to announce that we're shutting down".
"Hi I just got something for free and I'd like the opportunity to complain about it now." I mean he said there are no plans to shut it down. What timeframe? You want a promise that for X years you'll continue to receive this service for free, unchanged? They're extending the value. There's literally nothing to be grumpy about.
Except you literally just stated what there is to be grumpy about.
> "..I just got something for free and .."
What you're saying is now that they got it for free they have no right to complain about the fear of it being unstable. Which is EXACTLY why people are having an issue here. They are fearing that the fact that it is free means it also won't be able to be relied upon and you just proved why they are saying that. If you pay for something you have some recourse. If it's 100% free for everyone and shuts down, well shit. Guess all of your stuff is gone and you have to go elsewhere.
There are a lot of those questions in the blog post. Perhaps an explanation of how Instapaper development helps Pinterest as a whole would assuage some fears?
Hi Brian. OT question if I may:
I have a rooted B&N Nook that I would love to install Instapaper on, but the device does not have access to Google Play. The lack of an available .apk file is what led me away from Instapaper, even though I was already a paying Premium member. How can I get my hands on the official .apk?
Thanks so much for dropping into this thread. Would Pinterest be willing to open source non-competitive pieces of Instapaper's tooling, considering the user base is what is of value (monitoring parser and link quality)?
My first thought was to comment and say how sad I'd be if Instapaper shut down (I'ma premium subscriber), but in all honesty, my Instapaper queue feels more like of a burden than something I look forward to.
They should throw machine learning at it and send you the best summaries they can, that may reduce the "burden" feeling. Or maybe a way to automatically set an expiration for each link
Was wondering about that too. I wouldn't be surprised if this move is more about capturing greater market share than building a sustainable product line with a positive P&L.
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 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.
Doesn't this look like they are making Instagram a free app in order to collect valuable information which could be used for recommendations or following what is trending?
Hi Brian, would you PLEASE consider increasing the maximum read speed in Instapaper. Pocket's much speedier maximum read speeds (with iOS' great Alex voice) are a huge pull that I can't leave behind.
Pinterest could be using it for a tiny boost to their MAU numbers that they plan to report to investors after an eventual IPO. Good ratio of users to headcount (given only 2 employees).
My thought is that pinterest has a solid model for monetization for people who bookmark & read things they find on the internet.
That doesn't involve premium accounts but requires many many more users.. so maybe do a huge push by making the instapaper features free in a PR push, and work to get their active monthly users way up.
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.
I've been a very happy user of Pinboard for the last few years (ever since Delicious got super slow).
I even subscribe to the archive feature, although I have no illusion that I will get around to reading all my 20k bookmarks again...
It seems Pocket(which recently started using their extension to politely spam Chrome start page with article suggestions) and Instapaper are in some sort of war of attrition while pinboard is happily chugging along.
My complaint about the popular feed is that it's mostly tweets and Pinboard doesn't name Twitter links anything useful. It would be awesome (for the popular tab and for my own Twitter bookmarks) if Pinboard would use the text of a tweet as the bookmark title.
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) 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?
> 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.
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 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.
I'm looking forward to features like finding related articles, a https://longreads.com/ like portal or more customizable weekly digests (lately it's all US politics which I don't care about). That said the usual 'click on read later, read article on the train' use-case works very well for me, no complains.
I was a heavy user of Instapaper and switched to Pocket.
The reading interface for Instapaper is much better. Pocket has more clients, browser plug ins, etc so you can take it anywhere (When I switched Instapaper Android wasn't available).
Both are lame when bookmarking things like github repos.
I really want these services to open up their engine so that I can write a plug in for displaying bookmarked gists or repos.
Oh, I didn't realize Pinboard had a Read Later feature. I thought it was just a bookmarking service. I finally found some info about Read Later on your website, though I didn't see it where I first looked (in your FAQ). So this is different than your Archival feature, yea?
It's just a status flag you can set on a bookmark. It's useful for saving stuff you want to pretend you're going to read, then will never look at again.
sort of different use cases. I love pinboard and use it heavily, but it does nothing for the reading experience afaik (that's not a knock, i love pinboard, but it doesn't do what pocket or instapaper do for making anything more readable).
I've not used pinboard, but I think a good feature would include a time lapse... I mean I bookmark something then categorize it, then its in a certain folder, and I forget about it, after 3 or so months, I would like to be reminded about it.
You should check out wallabag. It's a FOSS alternative to these services. Can self-hosted it or use framabag hosting already set up for you. Build upon it as much as you want!
Instapaper used to feel like that when Marco still owned it. What is different to me is that because it was primarily an iOS-revenue driven app, it feel like it caught up in the Apple-inspired race to the bottom revenue-wise. Pinboard feels decidedly more indie-web and therefore perhaps less popular but more stable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is unfortunate as I thought an iOS 10-only update was supposed to fix this. Goes to show that the Pinner developer doesn’t care about providing any support.
There are several third party apps - I'm using Pinner, and it means I can save pages on the go from the usual share menu, and of course access my saved links.
Sure. Pinner for iOS looks good, works well, and has a share extension to allow you send pages from Safari directly to Pinboard. I like Spillo for macOS for the same reasons.
I've been using Pocket the last few months after having used Instapaper for a few years.
For iOS, I find the Instapaper app to be a lot better than Pocket. A ton of font options that don't rely upon paying the Premium subscription, and the UI is less obtrusive. I also like that when you share links from the Instapaper app, it sends the actual link. Pocket's app shares links as redirects, so everything shows up as a shorthand pocket.co/nnnnnn type of link. Both can have links added by an iOS share sheet, which is convenient. Pocket does have a nice feature in the app where it can refresh the article, in case you know what you're reading is outdate.
No Android devices, so no clue how it works on that platform.
The web experience is mostly equal, although Instapaper looks cleaner and still has more font options available than Pocket.
Neither platform is perfect with regards to transcribing articles. While I haven't done direct comparisons, it seems to me that Pocket falls back on displaying the original webpage more often when the site isn't a normal blog or news article. When it does transcribe the page down, it seems to include less non-article stuff(social media links, etc.) than Instapaper does. It seems to be a wash there.
For my own personal conclusion, I like Instapaper more, but Pocket works well enough.
Regarding accessibility aspects, Pocket provides a great "Listen" (Text to Speech) function (at least on iOS) with maximum speeds far faster than Instapaper. It's pretty much the biggest reason that I use Pocket.
A little late here, but the comment may be useful. I actively use both services (and Pinboard), but for different things. Pocket for me is "something is possibly interesting but I don't have time to work that out right now", Instapaper is a store of long form articles that I want to read (on tablet, Mac, phone or Kindle), and Pinboard is bookmarks.
The separation of concerns is useful for my mental model of what I intend to happen when I open each of these apps.
Pocket lacks the very useful send-to-kindle feature in Instapaper. Instapaper frequently fails to send images properly in their kindle digests, but it's still better than nothing (the key feature IMO). On the other hand, the Instapaper iOS app has some kind of problem with syncing, taking an inordinate amount of time to download a few articles (with the potential to ding you with substantial data costs if you open the app at the wrong time).
I found the general feature set to be similar, but Pocket has pretty decent article discovery/curation. I now use Pocket exclusively.
The only downside is that a decent chunk of their content (~5%) is from Business Insider, and there is no way to mute/hide a source (News Republic offers this). But they've got plenty of good sources (NYT, New Yorker), and a pretty good recommendation algorithm.
Not sure if you're talking about this but Pocket recently launched Pocket Explore - it's a little nicer than the "Recommended" tab in dashboard. https://www.getpocket.com/explore/
Also - If you're looking for discovery/curation then you'd probably be interested in what I'm doing - GGather.com. Right now it's in private beta - but you can join on https://beta.ggather.com
I've pretty much switched to Evernote. Its web clipping is pretty good. The pure reading experience is't as good as a dedicated program, but in return I use Evernote for more than just reading, and having the articles already in a "read later" notebook helps me keep the ones I want to keep. Note: I have a paid account so it downloads all my saved articles to my iPad.
I have been using raindrop.io for the past 6 months. I have nothing but good things to say about it.
Was a heavy Pocket user before that but their iPhone app was buggy in the sense that when I saved something from Safari to Pocket, sometimes it would save, other times it would not. It was literally hit or miss. Not sure if they have fixed that in a recent release or not.
I switched to Instapaper after a long time using Pocket. I think Instapaper's interface is better, and cleaner for reading (especially the web version). I also seem to remember Pocket's android app being slightly laggy, but I don't know if that's still the case.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like they didn't lose much, as you left when they tried to get you to pay for what you were using. If you weren't paying them, can you really say they lost your business?
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.
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)
