Pinboard's New Pricing Policy | Hacker News Reader

Pinboard's New Pricing Policy

blog.pinboard.in

173 pointshboon82 comments

Damn, Maciej.

  - Isn't this somehow unfair to someone?
  - No.

  - Should I be worried?
  - Only in the broadest, existential sense.

Thanks, totally made my day :)

To those who still don't use the service: use the possibility: sign up in this year, you can use than the service as long as it exists.

Maciej, in case you read here, thanks a lot for a beautiful product. I've already decided to pay you yearly. And not because I want to support you (although I wish people would support more such operations like yours) but because I really find your service useful and inexpensive. I see sillysaurus3 in his comment here also finds a huge value in using Pinboard for the amount paid.

As I already wrote "as long as it exists," Maciej, do you do anything to change the answer to this FAQ entry of yours?

"Q: What happens if the guy who runs Pinboard gets hit by a bus?

A: The bus is likely to be fine. They don't go very fast and are designed with passenger safety in mind."

"To those who still don't use the service: use the possibility: sign up in this year, you can use than the service as long as it exists."

One side-effect - almost certainly unintentional, from what I know of Maciej - of the change is that a surge in subscriptions might occur as people take advantage. If I hadn't already paid, I certainly would now. I originally signed up more-or-less on a whim, and I haven't taken full advantage of pinboard by any means. Still, I might now and, if I find it really useful, I'm sure I'll go ahead and pay for the annual sub.

Twist: he needs money to pay off his Christmas shopping credit card bill

The real worth of the service for me was the archiving functionality which was always to be paid yearly. Instead of saving the web pages locally on my computer and copying the links in some documents I can know now that they are safely duplicated by Pinboard and that I can describe them, give them the tags and then later easily find. And all that for just USD 25 per year, which I find a reasonable price. I'd certainly spend more of my time wen maintaining the same myself.

> Pinboard Blog

I think the actual blog post title might make for a better title.

By the way, I just bought an account a couple of days ago, after flirting with the idea for more than a year. Pretty good timing I guess.

Pinboard seems so far almost exactly how I imagined my perfect bookmarking service (and I'm a huge bookmarking nerd). I like and use the Pinboard Plus [0] Chrome extension because of its simplicity.

0: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pinboard-plus/mphd...

Thanks. I hadn't notice that. Modified the title.

Thanks for posting the Chrome extension! Now, the only thing that i need is a mobile-friendly bookmarklet.

    Should I be worried?
    
    Only in the broadest, existential sense.

Perfect. It's little touches like this that keep the service personal.

> An astonishing number of people already believe that they're paying annually for Pinboard.

I've always wondered about this. The subscription model is so ingrained nowadays that I cannot think of any other web service of any kind which uses a one-time fee.

It's not only a web services: I sometimes receive emails asking me to cancel the subscription for my desktop software, which is sold without subscription.

"I'm sorry to hear you no longer wish to continue your subscription for <your app>. Could I tempt you to continue at a special reduced rate of only $5/year?"

Metafilter has a one-time fee ($5).

It’s definitely worth thinking about customers’ preconceptions in this area even if you do run a subscription service.

Ours charges monthly, but the current month is the limit of any normal customer’s commitment. The first time we went out to an exhibition and met some prospective customers face-to-face, a disturbing proportion of them had assumed that because we charge monthly, we must have some minimum lock-in period of a year or more, like their mobile phone plan or broadband contract.

This expectation that they had missed the long term lock-in somewhere in the small print was clearly costing us potential subscribers, even though our site simply said the price was X/month. If memory serves, we converted at least a couple of people on the spot as soon as we confirmed that this was not the case.

I saw Maciej give a keynote at Web Directions South a few years ago... absolutely brilliant; the guy has a sense of humour dryer than the Atacama Desert :-)

Well never used the site before but after reading the comments I signed up. Thanks for the heads up on a better service then what I was using.

I will gladly pay and in the future keep paying whatever is asked to keep this service running. I get so much value out of pinboard - personally and professionally - that I've felt that I've definitely underpaid relative to value received. I currently have 4,206 articles across 924 tags, accumulated over the past several years. In Nir Eyal's terms, webpages are now a trigger to use the service, which yields pretty high engagement on my end. I basically bookmark with zero friction and effort now. It's led to a more enjoyable web experience.

For various reasons, I find it more useful than all the other bookmark / read it later [1] type services. Between the web bookmarklets and the new iOS extension to archive items directly from the action sheet, it's even more useful.

So tldr ... thank you, Maciej, for a great service.

[1] I do use Evernote and others regularly, but their use cases, when it comes to archiving/bookmarking content, are more niche / specific (although they excel in other areas).

43,000 bookmarks and 15,000 tags over 4 years. Sometime I wonder if I'm bookmarking too much.

I hope this also increases the profitability of the site. I am always somewhat worried when a site I depend on has a questionable business model. (When income only covers operating costs if the site is growing, that's questionable and with the old pricing model that was the case for all but the archive customers.)

My main issue with Pinboard is that it doesn't autofill all of your tags if you have a large number of them.

This is why I've ended up stuck with Delicious, which does do so. A shame, as other than that Pinboard is a superior service. But tag autocomplete on my complete list of tags is a deal-breaker for me.

If you use the Pinboard bookmarklet, there is autocomplete functionality that works just fine.

Nope. It has a maximum number of tags that it will use for autocompletion. If you have a couple of thousand tags then it only uses the most popular ones.

Can someone give me some hints about pinboard's advantages over, lets say, delicious?

I know people love it over here but from what I've read it seems to be more about the openness of the creator that the product itself.

I started using Delicious, and then Yahoo completely changed the service. Utterly. It broke a bunch of features.

Switched to Pinboard and never looked back. And it's stayed just as rock-solid as it was on day one.

Also, if you're using Delicious to archive some personal bookmarks, I trust those to be on Maciej's servers more than Yahoo servers. I don't know what kind of privacy settings Delicious has, but even if it's as painless as Pinboard's, I wouldn't really trust it.

In particular, all of your bookmarks will certainly be analyzed on Yahoo servers. Whereas I trust Maciej not to perform experiments on random people's bookmarks.

I don't think it is owned by Yahoo anymore.

Or whoever. If it's a free service, it's subject to monetization.

Why does it matter that much though? It was other issues that made Delicious fail, including that Yahoo sucked at acquisitions back then (they have since improved).

Depends what you're bookmarking. Some people value their privacy. A bookmarking service probably knows almost as much about your political affiliations, your sexual orientation, etc as Facebook or Google does, after you use it for a couple years. I trust Maciej not to exploit that information.

So it's not really about whether another bookmarking service can deliver or not, for me. It's whether they're faithful steward.

Science Inc. owns it

> In particular, all of your bookmarks will certainly be analyzed on Yahoo servers. Whereas I trust Maciej not to perform experiments on random people's bookmarks.

Well, there is this blog entry from August:

Researching Link Rot "This week I'll be running a little experiment in link rot,in preparation for an upcoming conference talk" https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/08/researching_link_rot/

Which includes this paragraph:

"If you are uncomfortable with this research and wish to opt out, please email me with your username, and I'll keep your bookmarks out of the pool. If you have questions, ask me on Twitter or email me privately, and I'll be happy to answer them."

While there's only so much privacy you can technically expect from an operator of a web data storage service, I think being upset about an opt-out study - announced only via blog and twitter - that would benefit the operator personally and users almost not at all isn't really unreasonable.

Edit after downvote: I use Pinboard and like it, think Maciej is a fantastic guy, and don't personally have problems with this study, but come on guys. He'll be alright with some dissent.

I've been using Pinboard since 2011. I switched from Delicious after Yahoo started screwing it up.

The things I like about Pinboard:

The UI is simple, intuitive, and works on my computers, my iPad, my phone, etc.

It doesn't do a million other things and lose focus on bookmarking.

It doesn't integrate with Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and the rest.

It doesn't rollout new changes every other week.

I'm not worried about the site getting sold to a different company and being ruined.

I'm not worried about the current owner deciding he needs to change things up and ruining it.

It's always online. In the past, even when getting pounded by new sign ups (i.e. after Delicious has a new release) the site's stayed online. I think the worst I've seen is he throttled or disabled the importing tasks for a little bit.

It charged me up front instead of making money off of me on the backend by selling my data to advertisers.

> It doesn't integrate with Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and the rest.

You can link a Twitter account, for one advantage of using the Twitter favorite mechanism to automatically bookmark (optionally archive) in Pinboard from any Twitter client.

I think I waited about 3 years since first hearing about Pinboard (here on HN no less) until finally making the jump from Delicious.

The bookmarking speed difference is amazing.

What does it give me that I don't get from pocket?

A non-VC-funded service where users are the customers

That feels like a fairly abstract benefit

— Delicious users, circa '07

Though certainly if you don't mind switching services every three or five years it's a smaller factor.

I'm still using delicious.

Ah, so you're the one! ;)

Indeed! :)

I may well give in to Pinboard while it's still a lifetime rate, but apparently my needs are so simple that the delicious drama didn't really faze me.

Delicious is still around and great. I honestly don't get the constant criticism. I've been able to use it without problem for almost a decade now.

They're serving two different kind of users in my opinion. Pocket is for those who want to save long form articles. Pinboard is for people looking to save any kind of website for future use whether it be reading, research, referencing, archiving, etc.

This just forced me to finally buy a Pinboard account!

I still can't figure out whether Pinboard is insane or genius for pricing it at ~$10/lifetime (or in this case $11/year). I've paid Dropbox about $480 now, and it's easily that valuable. But the amount of value I've derived from Pinboard is comparable.

The value is "You'll never lose this note, idea, or tool ever again in your entire life. Even if it goes offline, you'll still have a starting point for remembering that-thing-you-saw-years-ago-and-want-again."

There's a certain phenomenon in the gamedev industry that was discovered a few years ago. As you price something near zero, your sales increase more than linearly. You'd think that if you drop the price of a game from $50 to $5, you'd get 10x the sales. But in fact, you end up with much more. I wonder if something similar happens for Pinboard.

A Pinboard user here. When I signed up I hoped there would be nice browser integration but it's just not there. UX for me is just rubbish compared to native bookmarking or to even old delicious extensions.

Honest question, why Pinboard is any better than using integrated Chrome bookmarks sync feature? (ignoring the archive feature of Pinboard)

Hm, would you expand on what you disliked about the integration? You're using the bookmarklet, right? I just click on "pin this" whenever I want to save the current webpage, and click on "my pinboard" whenever I want to look for a bookmark.

The killer feature for me is being able to type in a description for each bookmark, because later on you can search by any word in that description.

I've given up on tagging anything though.

Was definitely for me too, been lately using fetching.io for the same thing but without having to bookmark. No integration though with pinboard yet

That's interesting, I've almost given up on typing descriptions and instead have a very large number of tags that I pull up quickly with the autocomplete. It's funny how our use has gone in opposite direction. Pinboard is great for me, and I like the spartan, but functional, UI.

Yes I do, it's slow to load, there is no search from the browser (which is a show stopper for me), it's not as good as "Ctrl + D" kind of bookmarking that you have in Chrome.

And if it's not adding anything on to the bookmarking and comes with a worse UX, why bother?

It’s nice being able to keep bookmarks when switching browsers (at least it makes me feel less locked in).

It’s also nice being able to share bookmarks with your friends.

Both Firefox and Chrome allow importing bookmarks from other browsers, and exporting them as a plain HTML file.

Personally, I also don't see the point unless you're using the Archive feature. Firefox Sync is free, encrypted, and available even if the servers are offline.

In Safari, for "native" Pinboard integration across any browser connected via iCloud, I make a favorites bar folder with primary category tags as individual bookmarklets. This shows up as a dropdown menu in Safari UI for Favorites.

Then I can bookmark and tag anything into a primary category with a single click. The bookmarklets look like this:

    javascript:q=location.href;p=document.title;void(t=open('https://pinboard.in/add?later=yes&tags=vod&noui=yes&jump=close&url='+encodeURIComponent(q)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(p),'Pinboard','toolbar=no,width=100,height=100'));t.blur();

In addition to tagging the item, this is also archiving it for future reference. Don't ignore the archive, it's worth the $25 if you save even a single needed reference from bit rot.

It is actually the archiving that is the main benefit of Pinboard. Then tagging and commenting the links for yourself, in order make it easier for you to find it later. The goal is to keep there more than what you'd bookmark. The bookmark is for me "I expect I'll be visiting this often." The link in Pinboard is "my archive of the stuff I've once read on the web that I can need later to refer to, in the state it was as I've read it." That includes the content as it was at the time I've read it, not just the link. And I want to be able to comment it for myself and tag it to easily find it later. If you just need the bookmarks, use the bookmarks.

This is what I use Evernote for. Why do you like Pinboard better? (Not challenging--actually curious. I've never used Pinboard.)

I try to like Evernote, especially because I read a lot of PDF papers and annotated screen shots are nice, but I have 3000+ Pinboard bookmarks because they are just much, much easier and faster to create than Evernote notes.

I didn't understand what the fuss was about with Delicious and (later) Pinboard, and didn't start using Pinboard in earnest until a year or so ago, but now that I've got archiving running and full-text search, I have no idea what I would ever do without Pinboard.

Thanks. I use the Evernote "clipper" extension in my browsers, which lets me save either the URL, the article content, or the full web page to Evernote. I can tag them, and edit the text to include additional info (one frequent addition--a link to the HN discussion of that article).

I'm sort of in similar shoes in that I've been doing this for a while, so I've got hundreds of saved pages and dozens of tags in Evernote. So I feel like Pinboard would need to be much better to overcome that inertia.

I've never used Evernote but from their web site, it's a quite different service, Evernote is more like kind-of Google docs than what the Pinboard is (the "social bookmarking for the introverts" with the automatic archiving of the content behind the links).

Evernote premium is 5 EUR per month, that makes 60 EUR per year, v.s. cca 20 EUR per year for Pinboard Archive.

And Pinboard is much more minimalistic, and I like that: it doesn't force me to "install the apps" or whatever. I add the bookmarklet and I visit the Pinboard site, that's enough for all the devices I have.

evernote has a long history of data just magically dissapearing

What's wrong with the UX? Do you use the bookmarklet? I can't imagine how it could possibly get any more convenient than that.

One thing I've loved is that many iPhone Twitter and news apps have had Pinboard integration for ages. See something cool on Flipboard, tap a couple of buttons, and have it in my saved links later when I'm at my laptop. Pinboard actually goes one better with its Twitter integration: if I star a tweet, it gets saved to Pinboard. With all these sources, I use Pinboard as an inbox for everything I want to read later.

With iOS 8's share sheet extensions and a great native client that supports the feature, I can do this with almost all iPhone apps that don't already directly support Pinboard.

I find a simple webpage to be a better UI for bookmarks than the browser dropdown maze. I suppose it matters how you use bookmarks. If you use them to go to the same sites all of the time (something that I do not do) then I suppose having your common sites in a single drop-down is nicer. Although you could have a tag in Pinboard and make that your homepage.

What I use Pinboard for is bookmarking interesting articles I want to read later, recipes I want to try later, websites that are awesome but I want to visit infrequently etc. and the simple interface of Pinboard is perfect for that, imo.

You don't need to use the dropdown, you can open the bookmarks panel that shows a list and a search box.

In Firefox, you can even make it your homepage, just set it to: chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/bookmarksPanel.xul

I don't see how that interface is nearly as good as Pinboard's. I guess we just have different tastes.

Whoever solves the linkrot problem will become very rich. Pinboard is a service that is eminently worth paying for. It's everything that del.icio.us was meant to be.

I wish they had a free tier with ads.

I'd stop using it instantly. EDIT: Wow. Apparently a bunch of other people would, too.

A pizza costs, what, $18? Pinboard is $11/year.

There's a huge psychological barrier when buying things like this one. Even if it costed $0.99. (Think about apps.)

While that's true, advertising isn't valuable unless the advertisers know something about you. And subjecting my personal bookmarks to data analysis isn't a line I'd be willing to cross. Once you use it for a few years, your thousands of bookmarks reveal quite a lot about you.

Back when I was using Del.ic.ous a lot I was in college and really bored I stalked a few people on Del.ic.ous just to see what data I could gather. The first person that followed me I decided to look into. They posted a link to their grandmothers obituary and from there I was able to get their real name and where they were from.. And pretty much knowing everything about their location to where they applied for jobs was easy.

You're not the potential client then, everything is OK. He can run his business how he likes it, and that includes his decision not to target the maximum possible number of free users.

You are right, I'm not the potential client but damn I would like to use this. I'm lucky only a minimal part of all web services use this pricing system.

> There's a huge psychological barrier when buying things like this one. Even if it costed $0.99.

> damn I would like to use this.

It seems then the barrier isn't actually psychological? Do you live in the country which makes the electronic payments impossible? Is it really expensive for you to pay for some service you like only once?

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