So what's the plan here. Just two months since Pinterest acquired them, they've shutdown Instaparser, moved their team across the country (literally: NY to SF.. I wonder how many employees quit instead), discontinued Premium--their sole source of revenue(?), and committed to no-ads... sounds like they have no monetization strategy at all anymore.<p>This doesn't look good.
On the one hand I like new free features, especially the search. On the other hand Instapaper got acquired by Pinterest (<a href="http://blog.instapaper.com/post/149374303661" rel="nofollow">http://blog.instapaper.com/post/149374303661</a>) and if they no longer make money from premium subscriptions and the service is ads-free, then how will they generate revenue? Selling publishers premium spots in my reading queue?
I'm hoping this is a 'Halo Car' kind of project for Pinterest. Instapaper has, I'd guess, a relatively large, legacy subscriber base, and their parsing and read-it-later tech is pretty mature. Hopefully, it's a product that they use for development of features to see if they are useful into the main Pinterest product, and so it stays around instead of just getting killed in 6 months.
I've been an instapaper free user for quite a few years, I feel bad about not chucking them a few quid.<p>The product is very good though, it's been extremely useful for me as I use the London Underground a lot, where a signal is often not available and I don't use the wifi they have in stations - so being able to load all my instapaper articles beforehand and read them offline has been great
Wow! I'm a premium subscriber and really love the send to kindle feature. I always read articles on my bed with good lightening.<p>BTW, it is the greatest procrastination killer. Instead of reading HN articles during my work hours, I send them to my kindle and -- usually :-) -- never finish to read them. A great time saver!
I would probably pay ~$10 for some combined services of blogging, link saving, todo list management, ad removal, photo storage, maybe even email etc. (posthaven, pinboard, asana, etc).<p>I'm not saying they have to be integrated just that I might pay that much for a bunch of premium services if the price were bundled.... and the services were entirely focused on functionality of power users, privacy, and not ease of use, ads and eye candy.. ie pro users... ie vim keys.<p>I would love a whole bunch of services that had really good vim like short cut keys (yes I know gmail has it but not a lot other things do).<p>Maybe some of these guys like instapaper could do some sort of joint marketing/sales effort or sharing of users to stay in business.
Hey, i'm a user that is interested in seeing the continuing success of instapaper, do you have any other ways to generate revenue? I'm interested in the services success and that of the people behind them, so i'm a bit worried with this move, actually. I wasn't a paying customer, but I could have been.
I stopped paying for their service as I was broke and they kept billing my account leading to several insufficient funds fees on an overdrawn account that they wouldn't stop billing.<p>Can't say I'd even use their service for free.