Pinboard Turns Eleven

Well, ask yourself this: what's the concrete value proposition you're buying into? "bookmarking" in itself is way too general and leaves you wondering why you want to spend 22$.

You're actually (a) leasing usage of affordances provided by a system which someone else took the time to design and build, and (b) leasing hosting for your collection of bookmarks on someone else's system.

Why would you do that? Because you don't want to do any of these things: You don't want to spend time downloading and installing some bookmarking program, you don't want to design and build it yourself, you don't want to deal with storing data locally (even though it might be really a simple sqlite3 database).

Likely, you've rationalized you're lack of want through convenience, security, risk of data loss, someone else has done a better job at "solving bookmarking", etc. etc.

This is a line of reasoning which is perfectly valid. It's totally fine just subscribe to a service. However, it just so happens that your demand for such a service creates a market. And it's equally valid for others to charge you for what they offer.

Everything else is just opportunity cost calculations on your end. You don't want to fork over 22$? That's valid. But then you have to abide by whatever else the market is going to offer. If Pinboard ends up losing subscribers to Microsoft and sunsetting, then that has nothing to do with the quality of the service, but the very fact that potential customers are far too keen on compromising what they want, need and value in favour of the free, yet less-then-ideal offering from a corporate competitor.

The problem with "free" is that it's the very bottom of the barrel. It doesn't pay the operating costs of a service. The difference between Microsoft and Pinboard is that the former has the financial leverage to cover the costs of a "free" tier. It's this leverage that defines the edge when it comes to conquering markets, as it allows corporations such as Microsoft to set up a far more effective sales funnel. It just so happens that it also drives competitors out of a market, and stalls any form of innovation. As far as Microsoft is concerned, they have no need to build a Pinboard clone with feature parity, if customers are all too willing to abide with whatever OneNote allows them to do, even when that's less then ideal.

In short, there's simply no such thing as a free lunch. Even if the market tries to convince you otherwise. It's totally valid to feel that Microsoft is "horrible", but by the same token, customers eagerly relying on "free" services equally sets the bar for them to simply get away with "horrible".

Out of curiosity, what do you use to store and search bookmarks on mobile? Both the old (third-party) iOS app I used to use and the old macOS app I used to use have stopped working years ago due to neglect. So I use the service pretty sparingly on desktop and pretty much not at all on mobile.

You're worrying about a business with a estimated minimum profit margin of 79%, using the most pessimistic assumptions I could think of. I wouldn't be worrying yet.

In 2017^: revenue was $259k, costs were estimated $17k, archives 31.8TBy, 126M URLs.

In 2020: revenue was $212k, costs were not specified, archives 82TBy, 192M URLs.

Archives are 2.58x higher, URLs are 1.52x higher. So taking the higher of the two multiples and pessimistically multiplying the 2017 costs of $17k (the cloud has gotten cheaper but let's ignore that), we get $44k in costs (this is probably too high by 2x), leaving a profit of $168k.

Users dropped from 29K to 19K, so you should start worrying when users reaches 5K, assuming that costs scale linearly with data (which they definitely do not).

In all likelihood, you probably don't need to worry until users reaches 2K. At current rate, that's probably about a decade, assuming ten more years of no changes to the site (such as mobile support) and etc.

^ https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/07/pinboard_turns_seven/

I became a Pinboard customer on December 17, 2010 and currently have 7,940 bookmarks, the most recent pin was added yesterday.

It's a great service. I recommend it to everyone.

I use Pinboard in combination with a Raspberry Pi (running Calibre + Mozilla Readability) as my Read Later service. Once per day the Raspberry Pi fetches unread bookmarks from Pinboard and compiles an eBook that is then sent wirelessly to my Kindle. This has replaced Instapaper/Pocket for me. Thanks to Mozilla Readability the text/image extraction works in most cases better than other Read Later services + I like having all my bookmarks in one place (and one service less to pay money for!). I've written a blog post about it and open-sourced all my work: https://christianhans.info/12791/running-your-own-read-later...