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Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)

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21–30 of 39 posts

Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)

#21
post #6

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.

[deleted]

Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)

#22

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.

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.

Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)

#23
post #22

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.

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.

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...

Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)

#24
post #6

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.

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.

Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)

#25
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...

Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)

#27
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.

Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)

#28
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.

Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)

#29
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?

Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)

#30
post #3

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 perspect…

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.

Not to be nitpicky, but there are some insanely expensive apps (medical, etc.) in the store, but probably most are under $1 — so for distributions like that, the median is much more useful a statistic than mean.
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