Instapaper Doubles Subscription Price | Hacker News Reader

Instapaper Doubles Subscription Price

blog.instapaper.com

41 pointsjrhey9 comments

How is permanent archiving different from the existing setup. As far as I understand, Instapaper already saved it's version of the article to your account, and I've never seen it lose anything because of a missing underlying article.

Are you saving the underlying article as pinboard does?

Longtime Instapaper fan here, the parser remains excellent and has kept up with all the newest shenanigans of the web over time much to my delight.

I was able to answer my own question via their Zendesk (from 2016), for those interested. It looks like I just had not come across the issue, but articles were previously not being saved server side with the exception of those manually emailed.

https://instapaper.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/227342887-W...

> We’re proud that Instapaper Premium pricing has remained consistent since 2014. When considering this price change, we wanted to ensure we won’t need to increase the price for the foreseeable future.

"We are rising prices today so we don't have to in the future"

Love it

Or a less cynical take is just reassurance that they will continue their previous nine year method and not start "price adjust" every year like most SaaS do nowadays.

I use Instapaper for on my personal computer and raindrop.io for my work. With this price increase I’m definitely thinking to move to raindrop.io completely - which I recommend.

How is raindrop when it comes to reading? My understanding is it's primarily a bookmark management tool.

I'm quite happy with Omnivore: https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore

It's open source, I can host it myself it I want to but the reference hosted version on omnivore.app is free and quite reliable. Dark mode, progressive webapp, native apps, full text search, Obsidian integration, Pocket migration.

Compare that with instapaper: Terrible Android app that looks like Android apps from 2015, okayish iPad/iOS apps, quite expensive now, every interesting feature behind a paywall. I guess if you're into the minimalist aesthetic or if you've grown accustomed to it, sure, keep on using it. But it feels as if this product has been somewhat on extended life support and people would care a lot less if it wasn't run by Marco Arment.

Marco sold Instapaper years ago... he has not been involved in quite some time. If you look at the Instapaper blog, you'll see they've been adding features consistently, most recently their major update to Notes features and integration.

I've never used Omnivore, but the feature-set mentioned in this price change announcement aligns very closely with Readwise Reader, which plans to _increase_ pricing over its current $95/yr, after it leaves beta.

I think the expectations of read-it-later apps are increasing, and with that comes cost.

For me, this feature is worth the price. Especially if it means my save history isn’t just sold to adtech as it is with some free services.

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