As soon as there is a non-PayPal option I am there. I know why this is currently the only option, but maybe someone from one of the many subscription-billing startups that haunt HN should send Marco and email and offer him a deal... :)
Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)
31–39 of 39 posts
Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)
#32Whenever 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...
Exactly.
Well, that and I'm sick of everything in the goddamned world being a subscription service now. Can't you do it like Pandora and make a big, obvious, ONE TIME PAYMENT, WILL NOT RENEW option?
Or better yet, just give me an empty box so I can pay you a few years worth of "subscription" at once and not think about it again. I'm sick of having a million monthly charges on my credit card.
Take my money, please.
Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)
#33What's the advantage of that over a delicious tag "read_later", that i've been using for years?
delicious work on all browsers (natively), iphone, android.
well, not for epub readers without a one line cron job on my desktop... but again, it works with android :)
Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)
#34What's the advantage of that over a delicious tag "read_later", that i've been using for years? delicious work on all browsers (natively), iphone, android. well, not for epub readers without a one line cron job on my desktop... but again, it works with android :)
Two completely different services. Instapaper will bookmark articles to read later, and cut out everything except the text. One downside is that it doesn't seem to be able to handle multi-page articles, however some sites have a single page view (or "printer friendly").
The killer feature in my book is the iOS app. It's a universal app, and will sync your article progress across your iOS devices. I love this — perfect for, e.g., reading part of an article on your iPhone while in line at the bank, then going home and picking up where you left off on your iPad.
Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)
#35I'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…
Like he says: PayPal takes a minimum of $0.30 from each transaction, so processing a bunch of $1 transactions is wasteful. He probably also doesn't want to scare people away who might not want to spend more than $5. Spending $3 won't scare people away.
paypal offers a micropayment "mode"
https://micropayments.paypal-labs.com/
5% + .05
Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)
#36Definitely worth the $1/month and happy to support such a great product
Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like he says: PayPal takes a minimum of $0.30 from each transaction, so processing a bunch of $1 transactions is wasteful. He probably also doesn't want to scare people away who might not want to spend more than $5. Spending $3 won't scare people away.
paypal offers a micropayment "mode" https://micropayments.paypal-labs.com/ 5% + .05
Nice find, thanks for the link!
Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)
#38Instapaper 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 m…
Same situation, but what I usually do is to go to instapaper.com/kindle on my kindle browser to get the last version of my read-later document on my way to work every morning. No need of USB and I can use it in situations like right before getting into a plane.
The kindle browser kind of sucks (now, I am sure they will put more work into that), but I have that URL as the first entry on my bookmarks menu.
Re: Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)
#39NYTimes reported that Instapaper has 800,000 registered users and 200,000 regular users. If every regular user signed up at $1/month, Marco would be pulling in $2.4M. Even if it's only a quarter of the users, that's still a nice chunk of change.