Instapaper axes premium subscription model following Pinterest takeover

Instapaper is one of the better news consumption applications, a read later service with a minimalist and uncluttered interface. So far, Instapaper had some of the best features reserved for a paying tier of customers. Subscribers had an ad free experience, text-search for all articles, ability to take unlimited notes, text to speech playlists, speed reading, and the generation of Kindle Digests with up to fifty articles. All these features are available for free, to everyone, the Instapaper team announced in a blog post. https://twitter.com/bthdonohue/status/793486202405998592 The move follows the acquisition of Instapaper by Pinterest in August this year. Opening up premium features to everyone is great for customer experience, but the best bit is that Instapaper is turning into a completely ad free service, on the web or on the application. Existing Instapaper subscribers will get refunds on the remaining period of their subscriptions, and the billing will stop for the premium tier. Users have already started getting refunds from Pinterest, and all subscribers are expected to be refunded over the period of the next two weeks. There were some concerns about the health and future progress of the company, but Brian Donohue explains that new features will continue to be added to give users the best possible experience. The value for Pinterest from Instapaper, Donohue explains, is in aggregate information about the links followed by users, and improvements to the text parser used by Instapaper. Instapaper is available on iOS and Android.