Instapaper Releases A Full API — With A Brilliant, Unique Twi$t | Hacker News Reader

Instapaper Releases A Full API — With A Brilliant, Unique Twi$t

techcrunch.com

28 pointstaylorbuley14 comments

When MG Siegler uses title superlatives, such as "Brilliant," "Genius," etc., you can usually replace them with NOP. ;-)

At this point he's copying and pasting articles from The Onion: http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/10/grotesque-macbook/

tl;dr - Article goes into how you have to either limit the API or charge for it... Then says that they instead... Charged for it! -sigh- Not that unique. Okay, they charged for something else and that came with it... It's still charging for it.

As the article says, it's taken no funding. Marco said there would be a point to being a subscriber, it's extra pain on top of having a mobile device that isn't from Apple. My words, not his.

Yeah, I was having a hard time reconciling this:

The obvious choice would have been to either limit the API or charge for it. But neither of those are very appealing options to Arment. Limiting the API leads to half-baked, "fragile" apps, as he calls them. Charging developers for API access or taking a cut of their app sales is tricky from a financial perspective, he notes.

with the following paragraph:

Instead, Arment came up with a smart third way of doing things. Thanks to the subscription test feature Instapaper launched in October of last year, Arment has a way to get paid for API usage -- sort of. You see, the only way users of any service can get access to the Instapaper API is if they’re paying the $1-a-month subscription fee. In other words, Arment has just ensured that he gets directly paid for people hitting his API. And he has just given plenty of users a reason to subscribe. Smart.

I suppose he's not charging developers for API access, but charging customers for something isn't something novel. (I love Instapaper, but this article is just weird).

The twist is that he is charging his users for API access - normally it would be a convoluted process where the third party developers pay to use the API, then they try to monetise the users via subscription or ads. This is a smart way to do it.

Clever? Yes. Unique? No. Spotify have "libspotify" [1] which allows developers to do pretty much anything (you could create a completely functional Spotify client yourself, which has actually been done [2]), but users can only use your application if they have a premium account.

[1] http://developer.spotify.com/en/libspotify/overview/

[2] http://spotyxbmc.tumblr.com/

This is great news. However, it's unclear how the requirement to have users subscribed to Instapaper should be communicated to the users of third-party apps. Is there an easy way to subscribe new users? Does Instapaper provide any library support for this as part of its API?

Isn't the result of this that users have to pay twice? Once for Instapaper, and once for whichever app they are using to access Instapaper?

Granted, 1$/month is low, but making people pay twice (only for apps that charge, of course) could be problematic.

It's a nice approach, just seems like it comes with its own set of issues.

No, I read it that apps only work for paid users (who only need pay once).

Once for the Instapaper subscription, once to buy the app from the third party developer (if it's not free)

Yes, but this is sort of like people having to buy a router even though they pay for their net connection.

More to me like having people buy software even though they already paid for their computer.

Instapaper is the backend. The app is the added value. Likely the 3rd party app isn't going to eclipse the brand of Intapaper so they'll be selling their added value directly to existing Instapaper subscribers.

The most likely scenario: Pay for Instapaper, and then view ads when(if) you choose to use third party value-added services. Win-win-win.

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