Limits in Instapaper Free 1.4

I’ve previously written that I didn’t want to impose severe restrictions on Instapaper Free to make it an annoying promo for Instapaper Pro. I still feel that way, but I’m planning to introduce some new limits in 1.4.

Why?

The simple answer is to increase sales of Instapaper Pro. But the reason behind that is more than just wanting to make more money.

Offering Instapaper Free has greatly increased Instapaper’s audience, but it’s not free for me to operate. Specifically:

• The apps require the Instapaper web service, which has its own monthly expenses and maintenance time. The server costs now exceed $550/month, and the vast majority of resources and bandwidth are consumed by Free users (or pirated copies of Pro).
• The majority of support emails are from Free users. I don’t have a staff to answer these – it’s just me here – and this takes a lot of time.
• The service’s only income comes from Pro sales and Fusion ads on the Unread page. Free users haven’t purchased Pro, naturally, but most of them never view the Unread page in the web interface. (The web interface is most frequently used by people who don’t use iPhones.)

Instapaper Pro’s sales have kept me above the water line so far, but the margin’s not especially comforting. And the service, overall, is growing significantly. I don’t want to use inferior equipment or reduce quality-of-service in the future just to keep the site operating without losing a bunch of money.

Instapaper Free has been massively successful. It has been downloaded 250,000 times. It’s been featured by Apple in the App Store and has received critical acclaim from many prominent blogs, newspapers, and magazines. And there’s one common theme in almost every review: It’s too good. There’s not enough reason to buy Pro. Free is good enough. And if you do the math, you can see why it’s a bit sad that 250,000 downloads haven’t yielded enough $9.99 upgrades to very significantly exceed my server costs.

With 1.4, I’m hopefully changing that by adding significant improvements to Pro, giving people a lot more reasons to upgrade.

But many of the changes are simply easier to add to Free as well, simply because they’re built as two different configurations of the same code. So I’ve decided to impose a few new limits to reduce my development overhead for Free and further differentiate it from Pro.

New features in 1.4 Free:

• Background updates. This is huge, and is the headlining feature of 1.4, since it dramatically improves the app for every user.
• Better page compatibility.
• Better storage for more efficient space usage and faster iTunes backups.
• Improved overall speed and fixed tons of minor bugs.

New limits in 1.4 Free:

• Screen rotation has been removed. (This was actually easier, technically, than leaving it in with 1.4’s changes.)
• Only stores your most recent 10 unread articles.

Given the new features, I believe that this is fair and Instapaper Free will be an even better value with 1.4.