Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

blog.instapaper.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 134 posts

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#51

Post by mightykan »

untog wrote: post #10
kstrauser wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#52

Post by 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.

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#54

Post by msh »

bthdonohue wrote: post #30
mtmail wrote: post #2

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?

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

What are you using this aggravate information for?

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#55

Post by MK999 »

idlewords wrote: post #18
phmagic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I run a rival site to these. Can you email me a description of what this kind of plugin would do? (support@pinboard.in)

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.

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#56

Post by AdamN »

mtmail wrote: post #41
bthdonohue wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Try out https://factr.com - we're building out a concept called Streams which will help with digests and finding all the information on a given topic.

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#57

Post by mikeleeorg »

idlewords wrote: post #18
phmagic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I run a rival site to these. Can you email me a description of what this kind of plugin would do? (support@pinboard.in)

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?

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#58

Post by mikeleeorg »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

This smells like an app that will be shutting down in about six months.

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.

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#59

Post by bthdonohue »

Happpy wrote: post #47
bthdonohue wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"I'm happy to answer any other questions you have." How much did you grow since now, last acquisition and first acquisition?

Well I meant specifically with respect to going free. As a policy, we do not publish usage numbers.

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#60

Post by bthdonohue »

msh wrote: post #54
bthdonohue wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What are you using this aggravate information for?

To better understand news and trending links on the web.
Post reply on HN