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Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

blog.instapaper.com

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Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#91

Post by canes123456 »

reitanqild wrote: post #82
bthdonohue wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mentio…

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

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#92

Post by sireat »

gant wrote: post #31
idlewords wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there.

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.

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#93

Post by 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

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#94

Post by [deleted] »

visarga wrote: post #75
rgbrenner wrote: post #25

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.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#95

Post by zodPod »

hullo wrote: post #83
hota_mazi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have no plans to shut the app down 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 an…

"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.

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#96

Post by ChefDenominator »

canes123456 wrote: post #91
reitanqild wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mentio…

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

Guarantee? No. Improve the odds? Yes.

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#97

Post by FreezerburnV »

mightykan wrote: post #51
untog wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#98

Post by kbutler »

reitanqild wrote: post #82
bthdonohue wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mentio…

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).

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#99

Post by mightykan »

FreezerburnV wrote: post #97
mightykan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone

#100

Post by vikrantvm »

bthdonohue wrote: post #61
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

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.

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.
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