A request for Pinboard old-timers | Hacker News Reader

A request for Pinboard old-timers

prettyfwd.com

268 pointsAlex3917172 comments

So the story here is that Pinboard used to be a site that charged a one-time signup fee for basic accounts, and in 2015 switched to an annual fee. People who signed up before the change in business model were grandfathered and grandmothered in, since a deal was a deal.

Most companies solve the problem of lifetime accounts by going out of business or pivoting, but this isn't really the Pinboard style. At the same time, the situation in 2021 is different than in 2015, let alone in 2009. As outlined in the letter, having old-style users move to the new model would give me resources to do a lot more on the site than just keep it running.

Over the years, a number of people told me they'd be happy to pay annually to support the site. It occurred to me that I would also be happy to take their money. So I finally built a mechanism that pre-2015 users could use to voluntarily convert accounts over.

I was looking for a low-drama way to announce this, laying out my reasons while not forcing anyone who didn't want to switch to make the change. So I sent out an email. But here we are on the front page of Hacker News instead.

Put a button on the site that lets me send you some fixed amount of more money and a bunch of us will push it. I clicked the link in this mail and it said "nothing to see here". Do I have to sign my non-consenting kids up for accounts?

You once made fun of me for how few bookmarks I had in the site. Then I learned about full-text search. Now I'd be fucked without Pinboard.

If you got the email, it was by mistake. Old-timey users who have archiving are already paying the full rate and were not the audience for what was supposed to be a modest effort to expand the recurring revenue base in a low-key way.

converted and got my 10 year old an account also, thanks for the fantastic service!

It's a good direction to take. One-time payments are a fiction: one can't reasonably expect to pay once and use a continuously developed and maintained service forever. Subscriptions are the way to go and I'm happy to pay for stuff that I actually use, so that it is sustainably developed.

I will be converting my account.

I didn't get the email, but I did sign up in 2014, and /convert confirms that. I love the service, and I was particularly taken by the old style business model which increased sign-up cost over time - if this means that model didn't pay off, it's sad news.

I would be more than willing to pay a subscription were I able to. I'm not currently earning enough money to pay my outgoings, unfortunately, so I'm currently looking to cut subscriptions rather than go in the other direction. However, I'm close to breaking even, and if I find myself in a position where I have a surplus, pinboard will be one of the first things I support. Given the circumstances, I'd be totally understanding if you decided, one day, to retire such accounts as mine.

I've previously contacted you on two issues relating to the API and sadly never heard back. One was a simple question, one was to report a bug. I understand you're busy, though, and you took some time to investigate problems with my delicious account resurrection the other day, which I do appreciate.

Thanks for those kind words! One of the many reasons I'm making this voluntary is that there's a variety of people who are not in a financial position to switch over now, and I don't want to yank the rug out from under them.

You can't really look at the old-style business model in isolation—the world of 2009 was one where there was a really popular free bookmarking service, and it was easy to piggyback off of them by offering better privacy and higher information density to a frustrated segment of their users.

In 2021, most link sharing has moved into siloed apps like Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, so there's not that big population of average Joe and Jane bookmarkers to draw from, and people have much higher expectations as far as their ability to manage large collections goes. There are also very deep-pocketed competitors (one baked into a major browser) that charge steep annual fees. The business has changed.

Not sure if it says somewhere and I'm missing it; does the annual fee auto renew?

It does not. You just get an email that your account has expired with a link to renew.

I'm an old timer who still uses pinboard every day. I converted my account immediately. The new pricing still represents great value and I've had incredible value from my original account.

Maciej's approach to this seems to be entirely reasonable: he's being open about the position he's in and giving users the option to support the site whilst not forcing change on them.

We could do with more services like pinboard - real utility, reasonably priced and not dependent on VC money and / or needing massive user growth to have a sustainable future.

I know that "me too" posts are generally frowned up here but I think in this case it's warranted: me too.

Agreed.

Great solution Maciej!

I did something similar for Remarkbox [0] and switched all accounts to full access and changed the model to pay-what-you-can. I want Remarkbox to become a utility as well and this was the best idea I could think of.

[0] https://www.remarkbox.com

Already switched last year as I wanted archiving.

My biggest fear was forgetting to pay and losing all bookmarks but I asked and the answer was it would fallback to my old account so then it was a no-brainer: support pinboard and get archiving all for one small fee.

As someone who does not belong to the old-timer crowd, and in fact pays an extra $25/year for an archival account, the news that Pinboard is even being maintained comes as a blessing.

In the past year things have happened like the API returning invalid JSON for weeks[0] and the search returning an error whenever I wanted to use full-text search (one of the selling points for the extra archival fee.) Not to mention the ongoing issues with page archiving in general (things frequently fail and need to be manually re-queued).

I really like Pinboard, I do, but the reliability issues have made me want to look somewhere else. My subscription is set to renew at the end of March and after seeing this I guess I'll give it another year. Here's hoping things trend upwards.

[0]: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1274055573902774272

This is interesting to me, because Maciej has repeatedly defended (and joked about) Pinboard having a "bus factor" of 1 (if one person gets hit by a bus, the service is done). To be clear, what I'm saying isn't intended as a criticism, in fact I'm very sympathetic to someone who wants to run a web business solo and maintain control over their own project.

But it makes me wonder. What Maciej is effectively doing here is asking for donations. Which is great. But the fact that many Pinboard users would willingly upgrade to a "paid" plan as a token of their support indicates to me that while at the 10,000 foot level signing up for Pinboard is just a market exchange like any other, at a closer level Pinboard users are members and not just customers. This despite the fact that Pinboard eschews the social features that are common among other bookmarking platforms!

I bring this up because this kind of thing arises in open source software development as well. For instance, when the developer of htop disappeared for a while, and the community forked it. But we (Internet culture) have not developed the same approaches to handling administration of services that are useful to a group of people. This surprises me. I think there's room for some movement in this direction, where a group of people can maintain a service that is useful to them and made available to the whole group. Perhaps various chat servers / Mastodon approximate this, but even in this case they're often run by individuals and susceptible to the same kinds of outages.

how about development bounties by DAO? i’d be surprised if something like this hasn’t already been attempted (i don’t pay close attention to this topic)

I think he goes out of his way to underpromise reliability and longevity, but the fact is that this will never make people less upset (and reasonably so, in my view) when the service goes down or loses data or disappears forever.

Compare it to a common sentiment I saw on HN recently, which is that selling a self-driving car kit is irresponsible even if you technically have some shrink wrap agreement that says “this isn’t a real product, use at your own risk.”

I don’t know where the line is in each case, but I think that there is some responsibility one takes on when one accepts money from the public for a product, and no amount of cute warnings makes that responsibility go away.

Anyone can promise anything they want. I prefer to lean on my track record. Not a lot of sites can brag about staying continuously online and not losing data for over a decade (exceptions include stavros right here on HN, who runs a competing site to mine). Pinboard is certainly business performance art, but part of the schtick is taking it seriously.

> Compare it to a common sentiment I saw on HN recently, which is that selling a self-driving car kit is irresponsible even if you technically have some shrink wrap agreement that says “this isn’t a real product, use at your own risk.”

I don't think this example is comparable. Most obviously, the effects of failure in Pinboard vs a self driving car kit are vastly different.

Interesting comment and I think it touches on a couple of points.

First I have a feeling that many Pinboard users are like myself and partly pay for Pinboard because Maciej runs it. After all there are many bookmarking options; I do get some utility out of not having to maintain a self-hosted service but all in all, I think we shouldn't discount the subscription-as-patronage effect here.

Regarding member-controlled administration of services, there is an obvious model here: worker co-ops. They don't seem to be that common in tech though . Pubnixes (classic example, SDF) are kind of close perhaps?

SDF is a great example, wish I had thought of that.

Hmm.

While closing tabs recently I stumbled on a particularly interesting (to me) HN discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506007) from a couple months ago.

I'm taking the following comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506951) out of the context it was posted in, but I don't believe this particular case takes liberties with the original intent:

---

> analog31

> ... Economics is largely about an emergent phenomenon, thus falling squarely on the "is" side of things.

> Emergence is a relatively recent concept in the linguistic timeline. For most of human history, everything seemed to be either of human action and human intention (turning on a light), or neither of human action nor of human intention (the weather). As such, languages did not emerge (ha!) that easily expressed emergent behaviors, things that were of human action but not of human intention (traffic jams).

> Similarly, one can see this with the subject of biological evolution (another emergent phenomenon). It's been nearly two centuries since Darwin got that ball rolling, and still almost any discussion about evolution is rife with inaccurately implied intention.

> One other consequence of this linguistic difficulty is that it leads people to propose solutions to perceived problems as if they were just about human action/human intention...

---

I think emergence is perhaps the most intuitively accessible way of reasoning through the impact of bureaucratic network effects. We've simply never before in history had to deal with human social cohesion at the scale we do today, so we've never reached the point where we've *had* to understand the dynamics correctly in order to make any progress.

Seconding this.

As much as I love maciej's blog and twitter, Pinboard has been pretty flaky for the time I've used it. I signed up for Pinboard in 2015, have an archiving account prepaid to 2024.

The API isn't reliable, archiving is lucky if it gets most of the page, it's not been a great experience so far. I used to use Pinboard with IFTTT and Wordpress to autopost favorite links with a description; two years ago I removed the Pinboard link to my IFTTT account because it just wasn't reliable.

Happy to hear of upgrades, one thing I would like to see is getrevue.co integration and full page screenshots of bookmarked pages (also accessible from API). Full page screenshots alone would justify my money.

I had some frustrations with the service in the years when it was running on auto-pilot, but since it mostly worked I shrugged it off (although I warned people not to join).

If I had been paying $22/year at the time I would have been a lot less happy and would probably have closed my account.

I'm a long time (yearly plan) user with a similar experience.

The crux of the issue is that Pinboard's centralized architecture is unsustainable in the long run. It's essentially an on-demand archive.org service with the same ever-increasing storage requirements, which becomes a bigger problem as more users join.

It must be difficult for a one (or two) person team to manage, especially since they also chose to manage their own hardware. I assume this is to avoid cloud storage and hosting costs, and I respect the decision, but this can add a lot of overhead on top of just keeping the software performing optimally.

The sustainable model for this type of service is self-hosted. https://archivebox.io/ seems like a nice solution I've been meaning to try.

The decision to run my own hardware is due to the extremely high cost of storing and moving ~80TB around on the cloud, as well as running a high-memory MySQL instance. I haven't priced it recently, but the last time I looked it would have raised my costs by an order of magnitude.

I can understand that, but have you considered a pay-per-use / tiered business model?

It's clear from this thread that there are users who have thousands of bookmarks, using dozens of GB of storage, and those who use it much less and whose storage costs are negligible. Having either group pay a flat rate doesn't make sense to me, and you end up losing revenue either way.

A tiered model could allow you to offset the cloud storage costs, maybe migrate things into the cloud and ease some of the maintenance burden on yourself.

80TB on AWS is $44K USD / year on their crappy (cheap rotational) "st1" volume.

Or $5k/yr on Backblaze B2 with their free ingress/egress setup https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html#calc...

Depends what you mean by sustainable. Pinboard has taken care of my bookmarks since 2011, it’s still here in 2021. Nothing I put up on my VPS in 2011 still exists.

This would actually be ideal for a 1-person business. If you pay $25/year, then the guy only needs to find 10,000 people, to make $250,000/year. Not a bad salary.

Now, the question is, what type of SaaS service can you make, to find 10,000 people paying $25/year. One that hasn’t already been consumed by the big players.

You forgot to remove the hardware, recurring cost(like the data link) and tax from this estimation.

I also wonder - in general - about the cost/effort to offer some form of support to 10.000+ users.

If half of them has even a basic question, that's already 5.000 answers to deal with.

A little bit more than 12 answers a day. But if they are basic questions you should be able to resolve a lot of them with a FAQ before you get to 10k customers.

One strategy that works more often than you’d expect is to pick a business that’s successfully being run by Big Players today and wait for them to self destruct as a result of their need to get Bigger.

The business we’re discussing here is a good example of this process.

I have an old grand-fathered-in Pinboard account, but I couldn't deal with the constant issues so I'm happily paying for https://larder.io/ now – powered by a small, independent business, but the product actually works.

Another interesting and quite original business model. I like the idea of 'use the product for six months and discover it's so essential, you'll continue subscribing'. What I couldn't find out from the site is whether or not there's an option to export your data if you do decide not to continue - any idea?

Yep, there's an API and import/export.

What is the benefit of using these services over, say, Firefox Sync?

I’m trying to decide between the two. I went ahead and paid for a year of Larder. I have prepaid for Pinboard archiving.

Larder is so small, there’s no real community around it. I think there’s a cli on GitHub.

> You joined the site back when there was a one-time signup fee.

I wouldn't if it wasn't the case.

I am much more willing to pay a one-time fee for a lifetime unlimited plan than a subscription. No matter how expensive is the former or how cheap is the latter.

I just feel extra constant anxiety for every thing I don't own which sucks money from my account regularly, also ready to fail me as soon as I stop paying or move to another country or something. I feel insecurity and anger every time I'm offered a subscription.

Having bought something on a single-pay basis, on the contrary, floods my brain with the senses of achievement and security. Paying some bucks manually every month may do too (provided I find the service extremely useful), but not annually and not automatic (by the way I was extremely delighted to find an easy option to disable automatic payments in Pocket - the only service I've found to offer this).

This feeling runs contrary to the practical reality. Paying once for a service someone else is running doesn’t actually mean you “own” it; Pinboard could disappear at any time.

By contrast, if you’re paying a recurring fee, you’re incentivizing the company to continue operating the service.

I understand, but I want to feel the problem solved once and forever and I am not going to have to pay any more ever. This is not really rational, I just feel this way. I am not going to be mad if the author actually discontinues the service (provided he lets me export the data).

This probably is because I'm a gig survivalist and have never had a long-term stable source of income. What I buy during a prosperity time is what is going to keep me warm during a broke time and help me out of it.

Regular payment obligations are a danger, a paid-forever thing is an asset.

Also paying once per lifetime greatly increases the incentive for scammy behavior.

To add, with subscriptions there can be an increase in price (or decrease in features) without customers having a say in the matter, so it isn’t even a predictable cost.

Pinboard offers one-time-ish payments for very long time periods. Cleverly, my money for using this service in 2024 is already earning the founder interest instead of me:

“Pinboard charges $22 per year for a regular account, or $39 per year for archiving and full-text search. You get discounts for multiple years...”

Meanwhile, looking under the hood of most “lifetime” offers means for the expected life of that version of the product. My experience is even the 90th percentile expected value is below 5 years. This service has stood out in contrast to that.

I appreciate your extra constant anxiety, yet manage to also be anxious whether I’ll miss noticing when the pre-paid months finally come due in Feb 2025. Hopefully by then pinboard will still let me pre-fund the founder’s money market account.

That's a false sense of security though. It will only last as long as it's profitable. No one is going to keep a business going into perpetuity if it's a continual money loser. I tend to always check if a service has autopay through paypal, that way it's easy to stop it.

I guess since the majority here is positive I shall offer my dissenting opinion.

I signed up for the site in the early days prior to browser sync being a common feature, but I just never found it fit my use model. It turns out the bookmarks I use tend to be either quick access shortcut which browser features like the bookmark toolbar or speed dial is a much better fit for, or short term reference which I end up just keeping in tabs.

I know HN here is generally very positive about subscriptions and mentions it's just a cost of coffee, but eventually they add up and the last couple of years the amount of cups of coffee and the overhead of thinking about which are actually providing their value has soured me on it and left me longing for days when more items were just purchased outright. I've mentioned in other posts moving back to music download purchases after subscription service library changes became problematic as an example.

Bookmark sync is just not worth a recurring payment to me. I use Firefox Sync these days, but if that went away I'd just run an instance before I'd pay for it. It sounds like from other comments here that Pinboard has not been much more reliable of late so it's not even like by letting someone else deal with running it that you get a more reliable service.

So you don't use the site, and you don't want to switch over to the new payment model. Seems like the problem is solved twice over.

There is https://tinygem.org which is free and a bit different twist to bookmarking/content discovery. Would love to hear what you think! (disclaimer: me/author)

> I would describe my work like single-handedly running a restaurant in an old château. It’s cool and fun, and the ambiance is great, but occasionally the soup is served cold or not at all because I have to chase a bunch of bats out of the kitchen, or replace a collapsed beam, while the diners sit and wait. This is no fun for either me or the diners, who rightfully complain that it ruins their dinner.

I enjoyed this.

Maciej's writing is always hilarious. highly recommend his "Gluetenfree Antarctica" and others (but especially the Glutenfree Antarctica) https://idlewords.com/2018/12/gluten_free_antarctica.htm

Also, on the same note(see highlighted yellow text):

https://idlewords.com/#archive:~:text=ceglowski.com-,Threat,...

Oh, I wasn't aware that this was idlewords writing.

let me disclose my secret: i meticulously every week add bookmarks to my pinboard as troves of internet knowledge to be used by me.

After 6 yrs (still adding), I admit I never came back to fetch any of them.

My trick is that historically when I was bored (or on the toilet) I would always reflexively reach for social media (mainly reddit) to pass the time.

A couple years ago I made the conscious decision to stop using reddit, but wanted something to replace those little moments of downtime[1] with.

So I bought a nice-looking Pinboard client[2] for my phone, and have trained myself to reach for pinboard in those little moments of boredom, generally reading through things in my "read later" queue.

[1] https://xkcd.com/303/

[2] https://2017.lionheartsw.com/software/pushpin/

This is basically the business model of all online bookmarking except Pinterest. You pay to not feel guilty about never looking at the stuff again.

I did the same but I stopped. I use firefox bookmark sync and that's enough for me for now and has been for years :)

Shameless plug: The other day I launched a new iOS/macOS Pinboard client named Pins (Show HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881622)

If you're looking for a modern client for Pinboard, give it a try.

This is a good client and you should try it!

This is great, thanks! I was always searching for something like that as most of the others are deprecated and broken.

It looks great but refuses to sync for me :( Too many (37000) bookmarks?

As someone who spent five minutes writing a pinboard client for my own personal use [1], it was frustrating that there was no way of testing these kinds of cases since even a test account would require extra payment. If pinboard were to pivot to a more api-friendly service, having some kind of test account(s) would be high on my wishlist.

[1] Almost the only feature is to prefill things like title, description, etc. because I wasted so much time, when using pinboard, viewing source and copying these manually.

Thanks for this good idea. I'll think up some way to have test accounts for devs when the new API drops.

37000 should be fine. Try changing the device’s auto-lock setting to 5 mins and leave it undisturbed for that amount of time for the initial download to go through. I’ve got a few users with 100000 bookmarks.

This support article for Pins would give a bit more detail: https://get-pins.app/posts/pinboard-sync-v1/

My general use of Pinboard goes like this:

Several times a day: Bookmark a thing (usually marked as 'unread').

Every week or so: Look back at my unread bookmarks. Read, or just mark read because I want to keep a bookmark but I don't want to actually read.

A few times a month: Use Pinboard to look something up that I remember seeing, or I don't - but hope I did actually come across already. Full text search helps here.

I wonder if Maciej would consider getting some browser extensions and mobile apps developed? I've probably paid the same for apps over the years as I have for Pinboard itself [1], and they've generally been terrible.

I'm certainly willing to pay more than I already am for Pinboard if it comes with some decent tools. Something like Promnesia [2] and note taking being integrated would make it the tool I use the most all day, so this would be well worth it.

[1] I'm a paying Pinboard user since 2011 and have been paying for full-text indexing since it became available.

[2] https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html

There's new browser extensions on the resources page. They're simple but they do the job.

Thanks for responding. I’m the author of a Pinboard browser extension! I’d love to make it full featured, not simple, but don’t have the time.

Others I’ve used just get abandoned too, and as you mention perhaps the API is what’s holding them back.

The reason I thought your own client(s) may be on your todo list is that developing a great API is easier when you’re dogfooding.

I hate the phrase dogfooding. Who on earth eats dog food?

I don't really understand the need for an app vs. a website that works well on mobile (my current project). Since many people like standalone apps, I'm clearly missing something, and would love to understand better what the advantages are there.

Re: dogfooding - The word nice apparently comes the latin word for ignorant but do you mind if someone says you're a really nice guy?

It's not a problem that comes up a lot

(author of Promnesia here)

In fact I do have my pinboard as one of the data sources! Although it's running against the raw json export, rather than a specific module at the moment. Something like this:

    PINBOARD = Source(
        auto.index,
        last('/data/pinboard/bookmarks*.json'),
        name='pinboard',
    )

Now that my HPI (https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI) thing has Pinboard support, I guess makes sense to add a proper module to Promnesia... I'll get to it one day unless someone else wants to give it a go

I'm an old timer. I paid a small, one-time fee over ten years ago and have used Pinboard (not without some frustration) ever since. I paid the subscription fee when I received the email a couple days ago. It only seems fair.

> I paid the subscription fee when I received the email a couple days ago.

I’m also an old timer but didn’t get an email. I wonder if it’s due to having a low number of bookmarks which I regularly clean.

I've been sending out emails slowly in hopes of avoiding a big public conversation about this (while welcoming conversations with actual users).

Now I guess I can send emails quicker.

I paid a flat fee to join. I think it was like $7 or something. I think the price used to go up incrementally with each new signup.

I gotta say though, the whole value proposition he made back then was a one-time fee. I had no problem with the switch to subscriptions for new users. But asking those original folks to switch over means that they can never not pay from that day forward without losing access to their once-permanent service, right?

Correct, I'm asking people to voluntarily turn in their all-you-can-drink token.

Thanks for confirming. All the best as you turn this new page! You have my heart (if not my wallet).

Yeah not only was the value proposition a one-time fee, but also paying at all. A lot of alternatives were free, and the pitch IIRC was if you pay then the archive is more sustainable.

I'd be interested to see what a re-up of a one-time (two-time?) fee looks like. When I'm being frugal I tend to cut subscriptions, but today I can afford a lump sum.

I'd sooner pay today for the 2011 Pinboard Civic and run it until it needs replacing, than lease a 2021 Pinboard Model Y.

I am on “old timer” and signed up partly to support Maciej and partly for the site’s quirkiness. As others have said, I am surprised he is still tending to the website because it is in shambles and completely unreliable. I have had warnings from ifttt.com several times now that pinboard is offline. I will not be joining the subscription plan and am instead searching for an alternative that is reliable.

One reason you get the warnings from IFTTT is that they crashed my API! Totally blaming the victim here.

Try raindrop.io or stavros's historio.us.

How does IFTTT crash an API? Too many requests? I feel like there is a story here.

See here: https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/03/my_heroic_and_lazy_stand_ag... and here (among others, you might have to ferret around on Twitter a bit): https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/712031809433968642

Ah, that sure sounds like a dick move.

Your skills as an expert politician and deflector are on full display here. Why is your and IFTTT’s issues my problem as a paid customer for your service? If I paid you a yearly subscription, is there any chance you’ll fix these decade old bugs? I don’t think so.

Sound like you paid for the decade-old bugs but not the fixes.

Typical.

Old timer here, I have been using pinboard for a long time: I have never used any kind of integration, just manually curating my links when I have the time.

I feel that it's unfair to call the site "in shambles": I never had a single issue with it and I enjoy casually browsing the "popular" link. And,yes, I will upgrade to the yearly payment.

If Pinboard is being maintained, this is great news. I had thought it was abandoned and I have been looking for alternatives.

My biggest pain point is the lack of maintained iOS clients.

By way of the Shortcuts app, every iPhone has a pre-installed Pinboard integration. I’ve taken to just using that to make new bookmarks, because you can make shortcuts that accept URLs from the share menu as inputs.

Here’s my shortcut to add an item to my Pinboard unread list. https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/486bc6782a60453cbdbcf9988c3...

OMG, I had just been looking for this exact thing a couple of weeks ago and missed it! Thank you for this comment! I’ve become intolerably disappointed with Pocket and this should enable me to self-host my reading list and still be able to use the iOS share sheet without having to get a costly dev license (or device) from Apple.

I really like Pushpin[1], which is actively maintained. Another user in this thread has also created a new client[1].

[1] https://2017.lionheartsw.com/software/pushpin/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881622

You would know pretty quickly if Pinboard stopped being maintained.

Try the new Pins for Pinboard app, which just came out.

I'm hopeful that once I get the new API out, it will be a lot less painful to build on top of, and we'll see some life in the apps department. The current API is a calque of the 2004 delicious API and lacks a lot of basic features (like "tell me what changed since time X") that clients need.

Pins is new. Pushpin is my favorite Pinboard interface/client in any capacity. It tells me how many times I’ve used a tag when auto completing tags. I love it!

I’ve paid for both. Pins is available on Mac too. It’s still new.

This was an easy decision. I appreciate the kind push. I continue to use and rely on Pinboard regularly.

Also, this is the first time I've noticed © Nine Fives Software which is just the best tech business name ever.

An old timer and haven't used Pinboard for bookmarks for a couple of years now (since mainly switch to org-mode). But still subscribed to some people's bookmarks via RSS, and nothing comes at par in terms of quality of (semi-curated) content. Seems very fair to me.

Got any recommendations? Or how to look for book markers to follow

Not sure about who specifically I can recommend, but in terms of 'how' sometimes I search the site for some interesting link I liked, to see who bookmarked it. Then judging by tags I might explore what other tags the person has, in case our interests overlap. Similar for specific search terms.

Not an old-timer, but really hope more and more ppl choose to support the service financially since I get massive value out of it.

Maciej's writing is great too!

He's just generally a person worth sponsoring/supporting IMO.

I joined the beta early so I never had to pay the one-time fee. I guess that makes me a very-old-timer.

A very-old-timer who just paid for 10 more years of service. Go, Maciej!

It's a kind of service that I would never use and have never used the advanced features of. I guess I barely use even the basic ones. Not because it's not a great service, but I am too much of a passive user of it - I just don't do this (any more).

4-5 bookmarks in 2020, 7-8 in 2019, and 2 in 2018. I have around total 900 bookmarks most of them from delicious import from the days when I bookmarked.

So yeah, while I am afraid I'd not be paying for it, I guess I'd just move everything to Firefox or iCloud or something (which I use anyway as of now).

One way I can definitely help is by emptying my (almost) freeloading spot at this point.

Services like this deserve a regular payment model I guess.

You're welcome to stay and use the site as long as you want. I agree that with your use pattern, subscribing to any bookmarking service doesn't make much sense.

I'm an old-timer and I haven't actually used Pinboard in years. I'm curious how others are finding it useful in an era of synced browsers and saved tab groups etc. If there is any utility at all, the paid plan is a steal.

It's indispensable to me. I've had my account since December 2010. There are over 9,000 bookmarks and 1,600 tags. It is one of two repositories that replaces a long-term memory that I sort of kind of don't have.

Just out of curiosity, what is your other repository?

The wiki component of Phabricator.

I do two things:

1) I take links from there and automatically share them elsewhere. I've got about 2,500 who read them in various places (Twitter/Facebook/Dreamwidth/Livejournal)

2) It's invaluable when I find something debunking the latest nonsense, and can easily find it again 5 years later when the same nonsense resurfaces.

Of my 67k+ bookmarks, I would reckon that at least 85% are from automation (Twitter/Feedbin/Facebook/Pocket/Flickr/Instagram/Fediverse favourites, things I've tweeted/facebooked/flickr'd/instagram'd, etc.) There's no way that works with synced browsers and saved tab groups.

As others have said. I don’t see any comparison to browser syncing. People say the same thing sometimes about password [managers]. For that too, I don’t see it.

Is there a way to make a one-time donation without giving up my life-time membership?

I love that the creator is doing this. There are so many services that I would have paid for, but instead they got shutdown or turned into crap. I was going to convert immediately, but the thing that gave me pause was "if you are getting more than $1.80/month of value". It's not clear to me that I do. Not because the service is bad. I've not had issues with downtime, and I think it's a fair price. But I don't know if I, personally, use it enough to get that much value out of it.

If you don't get that much value out of it, you definitely shouldn't convert over. There's no need to make a one-time donation; you already did that ten years ago :-)

Odd, I am on the one-time-payment plan, but I didn’t get the email anywhere.

I think it only went to people of an older vintage

My lifetime account is almost ten years old and I didn’t receive an email either.

As I said elsewhere in the thread, I've been sending the emails piecemeal so I have time to reply to people and answer questions.

Thanks! I’ve switched to the new plan already anyway.

So I just checked, and I joined in July 2009 for a one-time fee of, I want to say $11 (the price went up based on how many people signed up or something, I don't quite remember).

Over the years, I've paid for the archive feature, mostly as a way to continue to support Pinboard/Maciej -- even though I really don't ever use the archive feature.

I haven't received the email/the convert feature hasn't been flagged on my account yet, but if it is flagged, I'll be happy to convert. That said, if I do that, I almost certainly will not continue to pay for the archive feature, as I don't use that and just pay for it to support Maciej.

So my question is -- and I should probably just wait until I receive an email asking me to do this, but since we're having this discussion, I'll just ask now: Will you get more benefit from me paying $39 for archiving or is the hard cost of that service/the ~92GB of data I have greater than the $22 a year for a recurring sub? Because I'll do whatever option gives you the greatest income -- but I'm not quite prepared to pay $61 a year for bookmarking (not that an extra $22 a year means anything to me...it's just hard to justify paying about the same as I pay for my password manager for my whole family for a bookmarking service).

I'm not sure I understand where the $61/year figure comes from?

If I were to pay $22 a year AND $39 a year for archiving

Oh, I see. No, the two things stack. $39/year is the most you can pay for one account.

Excellent -- thanks so much!

Pinboard is amazing. I’m surprised people here are surprised and saying it looked derelict - I haven’t had an issue with it in 3 years of use.

Yup, it does what it sets out to do, and it stays out of your way and doesn't nag you or annoy you.

The fact of the modern web is that this is a bar most products don't reach, and many of them charge much more aggressively than pinboard.

@idlewords, I renewed for a year, having signed up in 2014. For me, it's an essential service.

I didn't receive any email about this; the most recent message I have is a password reset in 2017.

Aren't the deep discounts for multi-year renewal tantamount to recapitulating the problem with the original one-time sign up fee? i.e., having to run the service with no recurring revenue.

You should see an invoice for it on the site. I don't email out receipts, but maybe I should start.

The discounts are still two orders of magnitude more than what people were paying for 10 years of service before, so I don't feel particularly stuck in the same problem. And it will be a nice surprise for me in 2031.

I have the PayPal receipt. I meant, I didn't receive the email sent to old-timers. I figured you might want to know in case this was an oversight, and there are old-timers you intended to contact, but didn't.

Oh, I see. I'd been doing it piecemeal in batches of fifty or so so I have time to reply to people individually. Did not expect it to become A Thing.

Old timer here. I actually wound up building something that worked a little better for me (I wouldn't deign to call it a competitor) but the value pinboard has provided me for years makes this a no brainer. I will pay for at least one year.

Thanks for being so straightforward about this and letting us use it for free all this time!

I try to not sign up for things where I'd be super sad if I stopped paying and things went away, like old emails on an account I haven't used in ages.

I'm really tempted to do this. I fear there is no going back if I do though. I've been in tight spots financially before so commitment of this kind makes me a bit nervous.

The worst-case scenario (apart from bus accidents) is that you switch over, stop paying, and then your stuff gets locked into read-only mode. Expired accounts don't get deleted.

As soon as I realized there was an archival variant I signed up - 15k bookmarks archived using 45GB of space, which I can download anytime I want. The profile page even shows filters for any dead links (and why they're dead) so I can fix links if I feel like it.

Still the best online service I've ever signed up for.

When I went to the /convert URL I was given the option to pay for 10 years worth of service for what I consider to be perfectly fair fee. Running a site like pinboard on my own, or with a very small team, would basically be my dream job. Happy to support Maciej and the site.

Thank you so much for that!

> I did not make this change retroactive, since that felt like going back on a promise. [...] I have noticed this has created some feelings of annoyance in the paying group, odd expectations in the one-time group, and a general confusion about pricing policy.

These two things seem difficult to reconcile. I wonder why Maciej is taking the "ask people to voluntarily convert" approach rather than the fairly typical "new features will only be available to paid subscribers" "carrot" approach, which may cause some annoyance for one-time payers, but is probably still more generally in line with people's sense of fairness. Perhaps because he needs the funding to develop those features in the first place.

Sectioning off those features to paid only subscribers requires additional work too.

What is unfair about asking people to switch over?

As someone who hasn't used his pinboard account for year. Are there any good browser extensions and app with pinboard integration? I used to have an archival account and could see the use but eventually stopped using it, mostly because it didn't really integrate well with my use.

I'm also curious about your use for it. I see some people mentioning following other people's bookmarks on pinboard. Who do you recommend to follow?

I just installed the Pins iOS app, and it seems good. There's a new official Firefox extension.

There are more links here: https://pinboard.in/resources/

I have been a Pinboard user for many years but switched to Raindrop (https://raindrop.io/) some time ago. Pinboard did not see any update in years and the developer ignored my support requests regardless of me being a yearly subscriber. There are better alternatives out there by now.

I'm an old timer and would probably convert, but I get this at https://pinboard.in/convert:

> nothing to see here

Probably means you're paying for archiving

Yup -- I get that too, and I am paying for archiving. I asked in another comment, but I'll ask directly here too: is it more financially beneficial for me to pay you $39 a year for archiving for would the $22 a year for the service work better? I assume it is the former (especially given the relatively small size of my archive amortized over storage prices per year), but I'll go with whatever option gives you the most money.

The archiving is definitely better. Thank you for asking!

I'll keep that up then! Thank you for Pinboard!

How do we re-up? I vaguely remember seeing somewhere I’m good until 2021. I’m likely close to my prepaid yearly archival subscription coming to an end.

I'm one of the old-timers and upgraded my membership immediately upon finishing this email. I use Pinboard multiple times a day and am happy to see it still being maintained.

In addition to Pinboard, Reddit is a place I tend to store stuff I intend to read "later" (never).

Anyone know of a tool that could grab my Reddit saves and transfer them to Pinboard?

If you can get those saves as an RSS feed, you can use IFTTT to send them to Pinboard.

For those who prefer or are limited to no-JS:

http://archive.is/epAv5

archive.is should add (paid) accounts too, it creates much better page captures than pinboard.

Very well-written way of asking. Good job Maciej.

I'd love pay for a Pinboard tier which could solve the bookmark read it later backlog problem. Can Maciej do the impossible?

I've seriously considered charging more for a feature that quietly deletes 1% of your unread bookmarks a week.

I've got an iOS Shortcut which fetches all my Pocket URLs (via a text file I generate myself), shuffles them, and then pushes the top 20 to the top of the pile as "READ THESE PLEASE" kind of prompt. Should be easy enough to lash up some code using the Pinboard API to pick some random RIL URLs and push them into email / something.

Off-topic, but how Pinboard compares to Pocket (which I use)? Does it have an offline reading app?

Is this tool in the same category as wallabag?

What was the one-time payment originally?

It started at a few dollars and increased a tiny amount with every signup. I paid $9.22 so was a relative latecomer.

At some point it became a fixed price and then the annual price used today.

I believe it started at two bucks and change, and went up a penny every 40 users. The original payment model (in 2009) was an anti-spam measure, because I remembered how much delicious had suffered from growing pains. Joshua Schachter came up with the idea of bumping the price with every signup, which was brilliant.

Done. Immediate done. Was easy.

At this point I just pay for Maciej.

Agreed. As long Pinboard is alive and profitable, he gets to keep trolling inflated SV egos and they can't even hit back with their usual tactic of, "what do you know, you don't even run a startup". That's worth the annual fee by itself.

This comment made me flip. Just signed up for a 10 year archive account.

Never used pinboard but frequently enjoy and admire the whole story and the level of dedication that flows into it. It’s like watching the story of „UP“ (the movie) happening in the internet.

Most businesses are neither fair nor transparent in their business decisions which is often interpreted as a sign of strength and thus fosters trust by users. Moves like this are uncommon and could / should give us faith in the product, but don’t , because we interpret transparency as a sign of weakness.

For those arguing that asking for money is somewhat a moral question: try to run anything someone relies on for more than year, then come back discussing the right topics.

On that note, here's his excellent 2016 talk on website obesity and godawful IOT devices.

https://vimeo.com/190908762

I use pinboard a lot, and I'm inclined to pay. I'm curious to see all my old delicious links!

But, having said that, I'm planning to replace pinboard with my self-developed bookmarking site on repl.it.

This is either going to be a wildly popular or wildly unpopular email. Let’s see which way the HN wind is blowing today.

I’m a longtime fan of Maciej, and a regular-ish user of Pinboard for a decade-plus. We have friends in common. I hesitate to support this effort.

What I appreciate the most is how he is an example of how to escape the tech rat race. And how he’s been able to live his values and get involved in important political issues. I thought it was worth supporting a contrarian, hardworking indie dev and rationalized away all the numerous bugs, reliability issues, and just plain missing features.

And I’d probably still be a supporter if he hadn’t bragged, on multiple occasions around 2017-8, that there were years where he literally did nothing on Pinboard. I still admire that in a way - it should be possible to say that software is done, it doesn’t have to be ever-expanding. But I don’t love it as a user. Now every time I enter a bookmark I’m annoyed that (for instance) it won’t even prefetch the title for me.

I suppose it is foolish to expect any contrition, but I feel like I was lied to.

Pinboard is like Newton's conception of the divine, if an active Creator were not constantly involved, the whole thing would grind to a halt instantly. So I would take whatever I said about taking years off with that grain of salt.

I don't understand the bit about not pre-fetching a title. Are you using the add URL page or something, rather than a bookmarklet or extension, which does exactly that?

Extensions and bookmarklets I’ve used break eventually. I don’t recall any official bookmarklet that prefetched titles. Apps I’ve used go unmaintained and accumulate weird bugs (Pushpin, for instance, now hides the first result of a search under its interface, and updating the local db seems to be broken at times). The website on mobile might as well be microfiche.

In my experience the only thing that works every time is the add url page and the desktop website. If this is deprecated and there’s a better way, that wasn’t clear to me.

I’m fully aware this is part of the deal. And at least you haven’t had an our-incredible-journey post, unlike most of your competitors. It’s not been fun for me lately though.

Both the extensions and bookmarklets automatically parse the title out of the page. Maybe we're talking about different things?

There's been a mobile-friendly website (m.pinboard.in) for a decade, and I'm folding it into the regular site now that I've convinced myself mobile phones aren't just a fad.

Broken apps by third parties you can't really pin on me. Though I hope that world will get more vibrant when there's an improved API.

> ask people to voluntarily convert

or we'll convert you forcefully.

How many old time users there're anyway? If a business came to a position to raise cost on a small group of users I'd be questioning the project future overall.

> Right now, about 2/3 of Pinboard users with basic accounts are people who signed up, like you did, in 2009 or 2010 with a one-time payment. The remaining 1/3 pays $22 a year.

Not qualified as active but looks like this is the majority of users.

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