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Instapaper Takes Really Annoying Approach to Upselling

posted by Shawn, on July 28th, 2009 at 11:41 am, in category Uncategorized

I love Instapaper. It was one of the first apps I downloaded when I got the iPhone 3G last year, and I’ve used it as much or more than any other app since. Hundreds, or possibly even thousands, of articles have passed through there, including every edition of BusinessWeek and the Economist.

I’m a power user, and being that as it is, I’d be more than willing to upgrade to pro, or at least look at some advertising, if it meant that the product would continue to improve. And there was a very simple way to get me and others like me to do that: stop developing the free version, and add awesome features to the pro version. Eventually, that would be too enticing to pass up.

But instead, Instapaper chose a really strange path, releasing an update to the free version that is a downgrade in a number of ways: only your last ten articles are visible, it doesn’t save your place when you leave an article, and it’s now ad-supported (I don’t really have a problem with this, but taken with the former two, it’s a little ridiculous). There are some added features, including background updating, but not nearly enough to make it a net positive.

The idea, of course, is to make Instapaper Free just objectionable enough to encourage people to upgrade. But now I just feel annoyed, and upgrading almost feels like rewarding bad behavior. As I said before, the right approach would have been to stop developing for the free version, and make the pro features so great that the free version would just feel stale.

As it stands, I’ll probably try out a couple of other tools, including ReadItLater. Honestly, I really want to upgrade to Instapaper Pro, but I’m still put off by that “upgrade,” and the last thing I want is to encourage other companies to do the same later.


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  1. on July 28th at 02:04 pm
    Marco Arment said:

    I understand your point, Shawn, although I disagree with your assessment of my motivations and goals.

    For the sake of argument: If you’re a power user, and you’ve used Instapaper for a year on your $200-300 phone that costs at least $75/month, and you’ve used it much more than all of your other apps, and you’ve used it to read hundreds of articles, and you’ve been happy with it all of this time, why is it such an offense for me to ask you to spend $5 once on Instapaper Pro?

  2. on August 16th at 12:39 pm
    Michael P said:

    Yes, it is, Marco.
    Because you’re being disingenuous when you’re presenting us with an update, and calling for us to get the new version only to discover we’ve been screwed over and it’s now worse than the old version.
    It’s precisely because I’ve spent so much money on my phone that I will not spend another dollar on an app.

    And the most annoying thing in all of this, is that as someone who has been using it for almost a year, people like me helped you with bug tracking and make the project what it is, only to get screwed over like this. It is insulting, it’s trickery and I will never buy a piece of your software again.