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.
Do you get a lot of value from them?
Pinboard Turns Eleven
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me it’s definitely worth the price. Dunno why he doesn’t do trials though. Maybe it’s not worth the hassle? Those interested in the service can get a good feeling for it by looking at the product tour and recent bookmarks. And if you sign up and don’t like it then $22 is not that much money[1]. (No idea if he does refunds or not.) [1] In a Western country that is. I know $22 can be a lot of money depending on the…
> And if you sign up and don’t like it then $22 is not that much money[1]. ?? I'm not giving $22 to someone I don't know and then saying, "Well the service sucks, but it's not much money." He claims to give refunds, but the time cost for me - assuming I actually get it - would be far more than $22. Again, this is 2020, the world has moved on from this type of business model.
the world has only moved away from this model because the world is filled with fake unprofitable companies filled to the brim with vc money while trying to monopolize their respective markets with too good to be true pricing.
Pinboard is an old school business. You pay money for a service, and if you don’t like it you get a refund.
Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me it’s definitely worth the price. Dunno why he doesn’t do trials though. Maybe it’s not worth the hassle? Those interested in the service can get a good feeling for it by looking at the product tour and recent bookmarks. And if you sign up and don’t like it then $22 is not that much money[1]. (No idea if he does refunds or not.) [1] In a Western country that is. I know $22 can be a lot of money depending on the…
He does refunds, I got one from him, after a very short delay. I got the feeling it was a pain in the ass for him to do it, but he did it anyway. I later resubscribed at a higher price (I am fickle and decided I did actually want to use the service) - which I wouldn't have done had the customer service been poor when I asked for the refund first time.
It's not a pain in the ass at all; for Stripe it's a single click operation for me. With PayPal it requires a brief trip to their site.
Glad you decided to come back!
Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven
#64Oh dear. I'm a positive newbie here! Found my original receipt; 1st Jan 2015 for the princely sum of $10,60 for lifetime membership. And I only have a measley 1680 links saved. It's always a gamble with these one-time lifetime offers as you never know if the site's even going to be there in a few months time. But, even if Pinboard folded tomorrow, I'd still consider I got a great bargain. I must admit my heart sank a…
I think you can rest easy when it comes to new features. Pinboard has a pretty good track record of not changing what works well. The kind of stuff I want to add (ability to filter results by date, easier edit interface for tag gardening, API expansion) will not make the site any less boring.
Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven
#65Oh dear. I'm a positive newbie here! Found my original receipt; 1st Jan 2015 for the princely sum of $10,60 for lifetime membership. And I only have a measley 1680 links saved. It's always a gamble with these one-time lifetime offers as you never know if the site's even going to be there in a few months time. But, even if Pinboard folded tomorrow, I'd still consider I got a great bargain. I must admit my heart sank a…
Having followed Maciej for a couple of years, I seriously doubt he'd ever fall into the trap of feature creep. He's one of the most pragmatic software engineers, if not people, I've ever encountered.
Also possibly the laziest man in north america!
Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven
#66I like pinboard but when I had problems with my archival account a couple of years ago I didn't receive any response to emails even though I chased for months. No longer subscribe but would love to find a similar alternative. Maybe poor customer service is the reason for the number of active customers dropping off.
I run www.historio.us and I reply to emails :P
He does! And unless I'm wrong, historio.us has been around as long as Pinboard but never gets half the HN love.
Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I run www.historio.us and I reply to emails :P
He does! And unless I'm wrong, historio.us has been around as long as Pinboard but never gets half the HN love.
Most of that is on me, I haven't given it the love it deserves, but I'm currently rewriting it and will be modernizing it, making it responsive, and adding new features.
Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers My story might be relevant. I only recently learned about Pinboard. $22/year isn't terrible, but it's just a bookmarking service. Free trial? Nope - you need to pull out your credit card and fork over $22. You get seven days to request a refund. (Will I actually get it? No idea who's holding my money.) He's happy to boast about competitors disappearing,…
Well, ask yourself this: what's the concrete value proposition you're buying into? "bookmarking" in itself is way too general and leaves you wondering why you want to spend 22$. 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…
It's not necessarily a choice of "Pinboard" vs. "Microsoft" vs. "create your own bookmarking website."
For me, it's "Pinboard" vs. "text file". At $11/year, I would choose Pinboard any time. I've been a subscriber for years and I don't expect anything for free. But at $22/year, I'll go with the text file.
Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven
#69Pinboard is my secret weapon for those obnoxious lists of citations I sometimes get to spackle onto the end of comments on the internet. I've been on there since December 27, 2010 (Merry Christmas to me), and currently have 8,698 bookmarks across 1,544 different tags. I'd have a few hundred more if I could hurry up and transfer all the open tabs from ios safari. ...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user…
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 multipl…
Thanks for reassuring these message board Aristotles that my business is solvent!
A couple of data points to help you calculate:
* active users is not the same as paying users, it's people who did something in the last month
* costs in 2020 will be something like $17,000 for hosting plus $8,000 for hardware and a few thousand bucks in travel/hotel costs to the colo. So say $30K.
* the reason hardware costs are high in 2020 is... massive expansion, so maybe people in this thread are missing something
Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
He does! And unless I'm wrong, historio.us has been around as long as Pinboard but never gets half the HN love.
Most of that is on me, I haven't given it the love it deserves, but I'm currently rewriting it and will be modernizing it, making it responsive, and adding new features.
Enjoy, and congratulations on running a long-lived solvent business that actually answers its email.