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Previously priced at $2.99 per month (or $29.99 per year), these include an ad-free Instapaper website, full-text search for all articles, unlimited notes, text-to-speech playlists, unlimited speed reading, “Send to Kindle” via bookmarklet and mobile apps, and Kindle Digests of up to 50 articles each. These groups are relatively small but extremely loyal and passionate, and so Instapaper just needs to keep overheads low and customers happy to have a sustained, long-term business.The premium features of Instapaper, recently acquired by Pinterest, are now free for all users. Instapaper has never been a mainstream tool – rather, it has always appealed to the most die-hard readers and nerds. Why do you think the app has such longevity in a brutal app market? This may sound harsh, but what kept Instapaper’s reading experience ahead of the competition was mostly just taste and priorities.

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Over the next few years, the technical capabilities of the platform grew, my skills developed further, and I had enough revenue to enlist help from type designers and license my favorite reading fonts.Īlong the way, I also tackled fun but difficult features most competitors didn’t, like tilt-scrolling, pagination, paywalled-article saving, multi-page saving, and Kindle integration, because I enjoyed the technical challenges and recognized their value as a reader. I was a huge blog-reading nerd, and typography was very important to me. Instapaper from 2013, showing a range of built-in fonts.ĭespite being minimal, Instapaper was always polished. Over the few months between the text parser’s introduction and the release of the iPhone app-building SDK, I’d grown accustomed to the nicer text experience, so I designed the iPhone app exclusively around it.

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In 2007, responsive web design and offline storage in the browser didn’t exist, so reading articles on the iPhone was a slow, frustrating experience.īefore the iPhone app was possible, the text-content parser was a technical and practical need: articles had to be small enough to download quickly over 2G and stay loaded in memory on the first version of Safari for iPhone. (Before Instapaper, Read It Later was a Firefox extension that saved a list of links, like a bookmarks folder, without a text-optimized reading experience or offline saving.) Later in 2008, its first competitor – Read It Later, now known as Pocket – finally put these pieces together. Instapaper was the first service that combined quick saving with a text-optimized reading view and offline access. Your app wasn’t the first social bookmarking service, and so how did you differentiate it from the competition?īy not being a social bookmarking service like and – later – Pinboard! It intentionally had no social features - I designed it solely for personal utility, not sharing or promotion. Instapaper in 2010, running a dark theme. When iPhone apps became possible in mid-2008, Instapaper was there from the beginning with offline saving and a great text-reading experience.

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Since the mobile web was then in its infancy and most sites were designed only for PC browsers, I soon added a text parser to lighten the load of each page and optimize the text for mobile viewing. I created Instapaper, initially as a website with a ‘Read Later’ bookmarklet and a simple list of what was saved, to give me a one-click way to save articles for later. Meanwhile, I was at a computer all day at work, discovering tons of great articles I wanted to read but didn’t have time for. Marco: In late 2007, I’d got the first iPhone and wanted to read web articles on my train commute – but cellular coverage on the route was slow and spotty, limiting my ability to browse for new articles while mobile. Why did you create the original Instapaper? What challenges were you trying to solve?

We speak to Instapaper co-founder Marco Arment (also of Overcast fame) about the birth and development of the app and the secret of its success. Visit the Instapaper website or get Instapaper (free) from the App Store.

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The app and service both remain free, although you can opt for a ‘premium’ subscription, which adds archive text search, text-to-speech and speed-reading functionality. Read-later services have come and gone since Instapaper’s debut, but the original survives. Modern day Instapaper is high-res and has more view options, but remains sleek.