So the story here is that Pinboard used to be a site that charged a one-time signup fee for basic accounts, and in 2015 switched to an annual fee. People who signed up before the change in business model were grandfathered and grandmothered in, since a deal was a deal.
Most companies solve the problem of lifetime accounts by going out of business or pivoting, but this isn't really the Pinboard style. At the same time, the situation in 2021 is different than in 2015, let alone in 2009. As outlined in the letter, having old-style users move to the new model would give me resources to do a lot more on the site than just keep it running.
Over the years, a number of people told me they'd be happy to pay annually to support the site. It occurred to me that I would also be happy to take their money. So I finally built a mechanism that pre-2015 users could use to voluntarily convert accounts over.
I was looking for a low-drama way to announce this, laying out my reasons while not forcing anyone who didn't want to switch to make the change. So I sent out an email. But here we are on the front page of Hacker News instead.
I didn't get the email, but I did sign up in 2014, and /convert confirms that. I love the service, and I was particularly taken by the old style business model which increased sign-up cost over time - if this means that model didn't pay off, it's sad news.
I would be more than willing to pay a subscription were I able to. I'm not currently earning enough money to pay my outgoings, unfortunately, so I'm currently looking to cut subscriptions rather than go in the other direction. However, I'm close to breaking even, and if I find myself in a position where I have a surplus, pinboard will be one of the first things I support. Given the circumstances, I'd be totally understanding if you decided, one day, to retire such accounts as mine.
I've previously contacted you on two issues relating to the API and sadly never heard back. One was a simple question, one was to report a bug. I understand you're busy, though, and you took some time to investigate problems with my delicious account resurrection the other day, which I do appreciate.
Thanks for those kind words! One of the many reasons I'm making this voluntary is that there's a variety of people who are not in a financial position to switch over now, and I don't want to yank the rug out from under them.
You can't really look at the old-style business model in isolationāthe world of 2009 was one where there was a really popular free bookmarking service, and it was easy to piggyback off of them by offering better privacy and higher information density to a frustrated segment of their users.
In 2021, most link sharing has moved into siloed apps like Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, so there's not that big population of average Joe and Jane bookmarkers to draw from, and people have much higher expectations as far as their ability to manage large collections goes. There are also very deep-pocketed competitors (one baked into a major browser) that charge steep annual fees. The business has changed.
Put a button on the site that lets me send you some fixed amount of more money and a bunch of us will push it. I clicked the link in this mail and it said "nothing to see here". Do I have to sign my non-consenting kids up for accounts?
You once made fun of me for how few bookmarks I had in the site. Then I learned about full-text search. Now I'd be fucked without Pinboard.
If you got the email, it was by mistake. Old-timey users who have archiving are already paying the full rate and were not the audience for what was supposed to be a modest effort to expand the recurring revenue base in a low-key way.
converted and got my 10 year old an account also, thanks for the fantastic service!
It's a good direction to take. One-time payments are a fiction: one can't reasonably expect to pay once and use a continuously developed and maintained service forever. Subscriptions are the way to go and I'm happy to pay for stuff that I actually use, so that it is sustainably developed.
I will be converting my account.
Not sure if it says somewhere and I'm missing it; does the annual fee auto renew?
It does not. You just get an email that your account has expired with a link to renew.
I'm an old timer who still uses pinboard every day. I converted my account immediately. The new pricing still represents great value and I've had incredible value from my original account.
Maciej's approach to this seems to be entirely reasonable: he's being open about the position he's in and giving users the option to support the site whilst not forcing change on them.
We could do with more services like pinboard - real utility, reasonably priced and not dependent on VC money and / or needing massive user growth to have a sustainable future.
I know that "me too" posts are generally frowned up here but I think in this case it's warranted: me too.
Agreed.
Great solution Maciej!
I did something similar for Remarkbox [0] and switched all accounts to full access and changed the model to pay-what-you-can. I want Remarkbox to become a utility as well and this was the best idea I could think of.
Already switched last year as I wanted archiving.
My biggest fear was forgetting to pay and losing all bookmarks but I asked and the answer was it would fallback to my old account so then it was a no-brainer: support pinboard and get archiving all for one small fee.
As someone who does not belong to the old-timer crowd, and in fact pays an extra $25/year for an archival account, the news that Pinboard is even being maintained comes as a blessing.
In the past year things have happened like the API returning invalid JSON for weeks[0] and the search returning an error whenever I wanted to use full-text search (one of the selling points for the extra archival fee.) Not to mention the ongoing issues with page archiving in general (things frequently fail and need to be manually re-queued).
I really like Pinboard, I do, but the reliability issues have made me want to look somewhere else. My subscription is set to renew at the end of March and after seeing this I guess I'll give it another year. Here's hoping things trend upwards.
[0]: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1274055573902774272
This is interesting to me, because Maciej has repeatedly defended (and joked about) Pinboard having a "bus factor" of 1 (if one person gets hit by a bus, the service is done). To be clear, what I'm saying isn't intended as a criticism, in fact I'm very sympathetic to someone who wants to run a web business solo and maintain control over their own project.
But it makes me wonder. What Maciej is effectively doing here is asking for donations. Which is great. But the fact that many Pinboard users would willingly upgrade to a "paid" plan as a token of their support indicates to me that while at the 10,000 foot level signing up for Pinboard is just a market exchange like any other, at a closer level Pinboard users are members and not just customers. This despite the fact that Pinboard eschews the social features that are common among other bookmarking platforms!
I bring this up because this kind of thing arises in open source software development as well. For instance, when the developer of htop disappeared for a while, and the community forked it. But we (Internet culture) have not developed the same approaches to handling administration of services that are useful to a group of people. This surprises me. I think there's room for some movement in this direction, where a group of people can maintain a service that is useful to them and made available to the whole group. Perhaps various chat servers / Mastodon approximate this, but even in this case they're often run by individuals and susceptible to the same kinds of outages.
Interesting comment and I think it touches on a couple of points.
First I have a feeling that many Pinboard users are like myself and partly pay for Pinboard because Maciej runs it. After all there are many bookmarking options; I do get some utility out of not having to maintain a self-hosted service but all in all, I think we shouldn't discount the subscription-as-patronage effect here.
Regarding member-controlled administration of services, there is an obvious model here: worker co-ops. They don't seem to be that common in tech though . Pubnixes (classic example, SDF) are kind of close perhaps?
SDF is a great example, wish I had thought of that.
Hmm.
While closing tabs recently I stumbled on a particularly interesting (to me) HN discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506007) from a couple months ago.
I'm taking the following comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506951) out of the context it was posted in, but I don't believe this particular case takes liberties with the original intent:
---
> analog31
> ... Economics is largely about an emergent phenomenon, thus falling squarely on the "is" side of things.
> Emergence is a relatively recent concept in the linguistic timeline. For most of human history, everything seemed to be either of human action and human intention (turning on a light), or neither of human action nor of human intention (the weather). As such, languages did not emerge (ha!) that easily expressed emergent behaviors, things that were of human action but not of human intention (traffic jams).
> Similarly, one can see this with the subject of biological evolution (another emergent phenomenon). It's been nearly two centuries since Darwin got that ball rolling, and still almost any discussion about evolution is rife with inaccurately implied intention.
> One other consequence of this linguistic difficulty is that it leads people to propose solutions to perceived problems as if they were just about human action/human intention...
---
I think emergence is perhaps the most intuitively accessible way of reasoning through the impact of bureaucratic network effects. We've simply never before in history had to deal with human social cohesion at the scale we do today, so we've never reached the point where we've *had* to understand the dynamics correctly in order to make any progress.
I think he goes out of his way to underpromise reliability and longevity, but the fact is that this will never make people less upset (and reasonably so, in my view) when the service goes down or loses data or disappears forever.
Compare it to a common sentiment I saw on HN recently, which is that selling a self-driving car kit is irresponsible even if you technically have some shrink wrap agreement that says āthis isnāt a real product, use at your own risk.ā
I donāt know where the line is in each case, but I think that there is some responsibility one takes on when one accepts money from the public for a product, and no amount of cute warnings makes that responsibility go away.
Anyone can promise anything they want. I prefer to lean on my track record. Not a lot of sites can brag about staying continuously online and not losing data for over a decade (exceptions include stavros right here on HN, who runs a competing site to mine). Pinboard is certainly business performance art, but part of the schtick is taking it seriously.
> Compare it to a common sentiment I saw on HN recently, which is that selling a self-driving car kit is irresponsible even if you technically have some shrink wrap agreement that says āthis isnāt a real product, use at your own risk.ā
I don't think this example is comparable. Most obviously, the effects of failure in Pinboard vs a self driving car kit are vastly different.
how about development bounties by DAO? iād be surprised if something like this hasnāt already been attempted (i donāt pay close attention to this topic)
Seconding this.
As much as I love maciej's blog and twitter, Pinboard has been pretty flaky for the time I've used it. I signed up for Pinboard in 2015, have an archiving account prepaid to 2024.
The API isn't reliable, archiving is lucky if it gets most of the page, it's not been a great experience so far. I used to use Pinboard with IFTTT and Wordpress to autopost favorite links with a description; two years ago I removed the Pinboard link to my IFTTT account because it just wasn't reliable.
Happy to hear of upgrades, one thing I would like to see is getrevue.co integration and full page screenshots of bookmarked pages (also accessible from API). Full page screenshots alone would justify my money.
I had some frustrations with the service in the years when it was running on auto-pilot, but since it mostly worked I shrugged it off (although I warned people not to join).
If I had been paying $22/year at the time I would have been a lot less happy and would probably have closed my account.
I'm a long time (yearly plan) user with a similar experience.
The crux of the issue is that Pinboard's centralized architecture is unsustainable in the long run. It's essentially an on-demand archive.org service with the same ever-increasing storage requirements, which becomes a bigger problem as more users join.
It must be difficult for a one (or two) person team to manage, especially since they also chose to manage their own hardware. I assume this is to avoid cloud storage and hosting costs, and I respect the decision, but this can add a lot of overhead on top of just keeping the software performing optimally.
The sustainable model for this type of service is self-hosted. https://archivebox.io/ seems like a nice solution I've been meaning to try.
The decision to run my own hardware is due to the extremely high cost of storing and moving ~80TB around on the cloud, as well as running a high-memory MySQL instance. I haven't priced it recently, but the last time I looked it would have raised my costs by an order of magnitude.
I can understand that, but have you considered a pay-per-use / tiered business model?
It's clear from this thread that there are users who have thousands of bookmarks, using dozens of GB of storage, and those who use it much less and whose storage costs are negligible. Having either group pay a flat rate doesn't make sense to me, and you end up losing revenue either way.
A tiered model could allow you to offset the cloud storage costs, maybe migrate things into the cloud and ease some of the maintenance burden on yourself.
80TB on AWS is $44K USD / year on their crappy (cheap rotational) "st1" volume.
Depends what you mean by sustainable. Pinboard has taken care of my bookmarks since 2011, itās still here in 2021. Nothing I put up on my VPS in 2011 still exists.
I have an old grand-fathered-in Pinboard account, but I couldn't deal with the constant issues so I'm happily paying for https://larder.io/ now ā powered by a small, independent business, but the product actually works.
Another interesting and quite original business model. I like the idea of 'use the product for six months and discover it's so essential, you'll continue subscribing'. What I couldn't find out from the site is whether or not there's an option to export your data if you do decide not to continue - any idea?
Yep, there's an API and import/export.
Iām trying to decide between the two. I went ahead and paid for a year of Larder. I have prepaid for Pinboard archiving.
Larder is so small, thereās no real community around it. I think thereās a cli on GitHub.
What is the benefit of using these services over, say, Firefox Sync?
> You joined the site back when there was a one-time signup fee.
I wouldn't if it wasn't the case.
I am much more willing to pay a one-time fee for a lifetime unlimited plan than a subscription. No matter how expensive is the former or how cheap is the latter.
I just feel extra constant anxiety for every thing I don't own which sucks money from my account regularly, also ready to fail me as soon as I stop paying or move to another country or something. I feel insecurity and anger every time I'm offered a subscription.
Having bought something on a single-pay basis, on the contrary, floods my brain with the senses of achievement and security. Paying some bucks manually every month may do too (provided I find the service extremely useful), but not annually and not automatic (by the way I was extremely delighted to find an easy option to disable automatic payments in Pocket - the only service I've found to offer this).
This feeling runs contrary to the practical reality. Paying once for a service someone else is running doesnāt actually mean you āownā it; Pinboard could disappear at any time.
By contrast, if youāre paying a recurring fee, youāre incentivizing the company to continue operating the service.
I understand, but I want to feel the problem solved once and forever and I am not going to have to pay any more ever. This is not really rational, I just feel this way. I am not going to be mad if the author actually discontinues the service (provided he lets me export the data).
This probably is because I'm a gig survivalist and have never had a long-term stable source of income. What I buy during a prosperity time is what is going to keep me warm during a broke time and help me out of it.
Regular payment obligations are a danger, a paid-forever thing is an asset.
Also paying once per lifetime greatly increases the incentive for scammy behavior.
Pinboard offers one-time-ish payments for very long time periods. Cleverly, my money for using this service in 2024 is already earning the founder interest instead of me:
āPinboard charges $22 per year for a regular account, or $39 per year for archiving and full-text search. You get discounts for multiple years...ā
Meanwhile, looking under the hood of most ālifetimeā offers means for the expected life of that version of the product. My experience is even the 90th percentile expected value is below 5 years. This service has stood out in contrast to that.
I appreciate your extra constant anxiety, yet manage to also be anxious whether Iāll miss noticing when the pre-paid months finally come due in Feb 2025. Hopefully by then pinboard will still let me pre-fund the founderās money market account.
To add, with subscriptions there can be an increase in price (or decrease in features) without customers having a say in the matter, so it isnāt even a predictable cost.
That's a false sense of security though. It will only last as long as it's profitable. No one is going to keep a business going into perpetuity if it's a continual money loser. I tend to always check if a service has autopay through paypal, that way it's easy to stop it.
I guess since the majority here is positive I shall offer my dissenting opinion.
I signed up for the site in the early days prior to browser sync being a common feature, but I just never found it fit my use model. It turns out the bookmarks I use tend to be either quick access shortcut which browser features like the bookmark toolbar or speed dial is a much better fit for, or short term reference which I end up just keeping in tabs.
I know HN here is generally very positive about subscriptions and mentions it's just a cost of coffee, but eventually they add up and the last couple of years the amount of cups of coffee and the overhead of thinking about which are actually providing their value has soured me on it and left me longing for days when more items were just purchased outright. I've mentioned in other posts moving back to music download purchases after subscription service library changes became problematic as an example.
Bookmark sync is just not worth a recurring payment to me. I use Firefox Sync these days, but if that went away I'd just run an instance before I'd pay for it. It sounds like from other comments here that Pinboard has not been much more reliable of late so it's not even like by letting someone else deal with running it that you get a more reliable service.
So you don't use the site, and you don't want to switch over to the new payment model. Seems like the problem is solved twice over.
There is https://tinygem.org which is free and a bit different twist to bookmarking/content discovery. Would love to hear what you think! (disclaimer: me/author)
> I would describe my work like single-handedly running a restaurant in an old chĆ¢teau. Itās cool and fun, and the ambiance is great, but occasionally the soup is served cold or not at all because I have to chase a bunch of bats out of the kitchen, or replace a collapsed beam, while the diners sit and wait. This is no fun for either me or the diners, who rightfully complain that it ruins their dinner.
I enjoyed this.
Maciej's writing is always hilarious. highly recommend his "Gluetenfree Antarctica" and others (but especially the Glutenfree Antarctica) https://idlewords.com/2018/12/gluten_free_antarctica.htm
Also, on the same note(see highlighted yellow text):
https://idlewords.com/#archive:~:text=ceglowski.com-,Threat,...
Oh, I wasn't aware that this was idlewords writing.
let me disclose my secret: i meticulously every week add bookmarks to my pinboard as troves of internet knowledge to be used by me.
After 6 yrs (still adding), I admit I never came back to fetch any of them.
This is basically the business model of all online bookmarking except Pinterest. You pay to not feel guilty about never looking at the stuff again.
My trick is that historically when I was bored (or on the toilet) I would always reflexively reach for social media (mainly reddit) to pass the time.
A couple years ago I made the conscious decision to stop using reddit, but wanted something to replace those little moments of downtime[1] with.
So I bought a nice-looking Pinboard client[2] for my phone, and have trained myself to reach for pinboard in those little moments of boredom, generally reading through things in my "read later" queue.
I did the same but I stopped. I use firefox bookmark sync and that's enough for me for now and has been for years :)
Shameless plug: The other day I launched a new iOS/macOS Pinboard client named Pins (Show HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881622)
If you're looking for a modern client for Pinboard, give it a try.
This is a good client and you should try it!
This is great, thanks! I was always searching for something like that as most of the others are deprecated and broken.
It looks great but refuses to sync for me :( Too many (37000) bookmarks?
As someone who spent five minutes writing a pinboard client for my own personal use [1], it was frustrating that there was no way of testing these kinds of cases since even a test account would require extra payment. If pinboard were to pivot to a more api-friendly service, having some kind of test account(s) would be high on my wishlist.
[1] Almost the only feature is to prefill things like title, description, etc. because I wasted so much time, when using pinboard, viewing source and copying these manually.
Thanks for this good idea. I'll think up some way to have test accounts for devs when the new API drops.
37000 should be fine. Try changing the deviceās auto-lock setting to 5 mins and leave it undisturbed for that amount of time for the initial download to go through. Iāve got a few users with 100000 bookmarks.
This support article for Pins would give a bit more detail: https://get-pins.app/posts/pinboard-sync-v1/
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