Instapaper Premium Features Now Free To All Users

Instapaper and Pocket are both handy “read it later” services that lets you save and organize articles to read at your convenience (often with better formatting). Instapaper was recently acquired by Pinterest and just announced that they would release all the premium features to all users for free (formerly $30 a year) . These premium features 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
• Kindle Digests of up to 50 articles

The Kindle Digests are a nice feature if you prefer reading text on your Amazon Kindle. The Text-to-Speech lets you listen to articles aloud while you are driving. Speed reading was a little funky to me, but some people love it. (Try it yourself.) Here are the responses of an Instapaper rep on concerns about the future:

There’s no catch. Our operational overhead is low, and now that we’re owned by Pinterest we can focus on just delivering the best product to our users.

[…] You are not the product. The value that Pinterest gets from Instapaper are improvements to our text parser and aggregate information about links on the web. We have no plans to serve ads.

Competitor Pocket is also completely free, although they do slot in some ads now. They are slightly different, I wouldn’t say one is better than the other for all people.