Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation

First, "I did X, then Y increased, then I did X again right before Z, which clearly increases Y, happened, and Y increased again!" is not empirical evidence, and many of Marco's conclusions were very dependent on (I think unreasonable) assumptions that were based on his gut feelings.

More importantly, the argument of "he'd lose customers if he removed the free app" is about long-term, future effects. I perceive that Matt is trying to say that, say 1 year from now, the paid Instapaper app will have fewer customers if there is no free app in that interval than it would have if the free app had existed in that interval. Of course, this is fundamentally impossible to test, and is based on gut feelings, but it was not disproven by any "empirical evidence" presented by Marco. But it's no more unreasonable for any of us to have a gut feeling in this respect. Personally, I believe a lot of Marco's rationale, and do think that he's better off now without a free app, but he certainly did not prove this conclusion.

That section does not address the likeliness of Instapaper having gained a critical mass of users and people knowing about its existence before being able to pull the free version.

There was already a 'web only' service before there was a web app and together with the free version that has resulted in a lot of people 'knowing about it'. Once you reach critical mass, further sales can result from word-of-mouth advertisements and 'having heard of it once'.

We would have to do a verification experiment: go back 18 months in the past and pull the free version from the appstore. There is not a doubt in my mind that that would have turned out bad for Marco.

  Not only did sales increase incrementally, but nobody seemed to notice.

What does this mean? This "nobody even noticed!" attitude he expresses several times seems very ignorant to me. Sure, very few people heard that Instapaper had a free iPhone app, didn't look for it right away, then a month later searched for it, saw it wasn't in the App Store, and emailed or tweeted Marco personally asking what happened. This is the only chain of events I can see leading to a potential user giving Marco direct feedback, the lack of which is what he seemed to interpret as "nobody noticed."

If you change a bunch of road signs, but everyone from the neighborhood is on vacation and so no one sees the new configuration and exclaims "What is this?!", does that suddenly mean that new drivers won't act differently in response to the new road sign configurations? Note that assuming that somehow "everyone from the neighborhood is on vacation" is not at all an unrealistic assumption to make. People who had already downloaded the free app were golden when he removed it, so long as they didn't wipe their iPhone or upgrade. You could argue that maybe they would've thought "huh, why haven't I gotten updates in a while?" First of all, I doubt anyone thinks like that. I know I certainly don't think about updates until the App Store tells me I have 10 and I get frustrated at it; I only notice when apps require updates, not when they don't require updates. Second of all, they may have just thought the free app would be getting less updates than the paid one.

And there are countless other reasons why "no one has personally emailed me about the absence of this" is a terrible reason to conclude "nobody really cared" and especially (what I think he is implicitly getting at) "no potential future buyers of the paid app were turned off by the absence of a free app." Maybe they only cared a little and got bored once they couldn't find it in the app store, but otherwise would've been engaged by the app or (since he acknowledges that there are few converts) have been interested enough to tell friends who would eventually pay for it. Maybe, and this is _crazy_ to propose, a significant number of geeks went looking for the free app having heard a lot about Instapaper, saw there was no free app, were pissed, but didn't know or think or care to email Marco about it; maybe they thought he did it purposefully and didn't want to bug him, maybe they were intimidated, maybe they didn't know who Marco was, etc.

Yes - he fails to note that the reason that most people learned about instapaper is because he offers a free version of it. I love instapaper but haven't contemplated paying for it because the differences between the free and paid versions are relatively minimal.

Freemium has a lot of perks, the chief one being - getting the word out about the product. How many people would know about dropbox if they didn't offer a free version?

I've been using the free Instapaper iPhone app for some time, until it just completely stopped working. Trying to update, it would tell me that there was no network connection. Uh, wrong. Over and over. Eventually I logged out, wiped the local cache, and tried logging in fresh. And what did I get? A blank page with "403" at the top.

My impression of the app at this point was that either the developer is a fuck up or that I've been geo-locked out because I'm not in the U.S. Actually the second implies the first. I didn't care, I just stopped using Instapaper.

On the basis of this post, I took a leap of faith. Despite a complete failure of user experience with the free app, I bet $5 that maybe the paid app would, well, work. And so far it has.

Marco, if you're listening, you make some great points in this post, but your upselling in my experience is... as described.