Instapaper Subscriptions (beta) | Hacker News Reader

Instapaper Subscriptions (beta)

instapaper.com

60 pointsinm37 comments

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.

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 perspective you have a full 12 months income in the bank now.

One of the downsides to billing $12/year is that you have to really start thinking about unearned revenue and all that fun stuff. This might be a way to avoid that mess and give him the ability to reprice in three months if that becomes necessary.

This does give him the flexibility to raise prices in 3 months though.

Well unless he's still trying to discover the sweet price point.. If he thinks he wants to charge $3 a month after 3 months, he will still have most of the early adopters ready to pay instead of waiting for a year for the subscription to expire for the early adopters

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.

The iPhone app also has some value to it that makes it worth the $4.99, e.g., 250 article capacity, iPad compatible, and it remembers your position.

The only benefit subscribing gives to you right now is being able to hide ads, which people can already do for free, and the warm, fuzzy feeling you get from supporting Instapaper's development.

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.

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!

I love the honesty here:

"What are the benefits?

Right now? Almost nothing, except knowing that you are supporting the Instapaper service’s operation and future feature development."

$1/mo to support one of my most used services is a no brainer. I hope others feel the same way - Marco is going indie and he's definitely getting my $1/mo to support his new full time business venture.

I honestly would have paid $5-$10/month for Instapaper. It is by far the most used app I have on my iPhone.

I wish Marco the best of luck, and can't wait to see what new features he comes up with.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Excellent. I'm happy to support one of my favorite services. Instapaper is one of the few apps (on iPad for me) that have actually improved the quality of my daily life -- how often can you say that about an app?

Specifically, it's retraining my brain to slow down, go deeper, and think critically.

My only concern would be rewarding the content producer, because I often skip the web page all together.

Perhaps integrating Flattr's API for those domains that have it set up?

Previously it would have been kind of a dick move to make alternate reader apps, but maybe now he could perhaps support an official API for subscribers

I don't even see an option to pay for any kind of service (logged in or not). Did i miss the link somewhere?

Click the thread's link: http://www.instapaper.com/subscription

Then click on the Paypal 'subscribe' logo right in the middle of the screen.

You also need to be logged in, otherwise it redirects to the home page.

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?

NYTimes 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.

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... :)

I'm not sure how much it's worth but I was happy to subscribe for $1 and sent a separate gift via PayPal for $10.

Go get 'em Marco!

I'd pay for Kindle synchronization to actually work. Mine hasn't in a week or so.

At $3/3mo, I just signed up without thinking about it. I love instapaper.

Definitely worth the $1/month and happy to support such a great product

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...

What'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.

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