[_frog]

It feels weird to me that they’re putting those monetisation hooks back in without talking at all about the future of the product. I’ve used Instapaper for many years now, and I’m more than happy to pay for a service that I get so much value out of, but that said, Instapaper’s largely stagnated in recent years, with very little in the way of major updates or improvements. I’d really love to see even a rough roadmap that could give me some idea of where they want to be say, a year from now, but right now I don’t have a ton of confidence.

[tptacek]

Why do you want major updates and improvements? Are you a customer of Instapaper's, or an investor hoping your dollars today pay off in a much better product later? A thing I like about the service I use is that it doesn't add major new things regularly; it just does the thing I ask it to do and gets out of the way.

[wpietri]

I'm in the same category. They said the plan is to "ensure Instapaper can continue for the foreseeable future", which is all the feature I need.

I could believe they will think of other things I want besides continuing to work well. But I don't want them to feel like they have to be on a feature treadmill.

[bloodorange]

Unfortunately, though this might be the view of some (or many) users, the organisation which provides the product - if profit driven - can not maintain the 'development' level of staffing just for maintenance and likewise the valuation also changes if they are only in maintenance mode.

So, it is not realistic to expect that they'll not do much. Ultimately, this is the bane of a consumption drive society.

[tmcw]

Why do products have to justify a price via updates and new whiz-bang features? Instapaper works great, and I'm happy to pay to keep the lights on. I'd much prefer that, than for it to be another startup constantly pivoting to find out where the money is, and making lots of changes as short-term experiments.

[chipotle_coyote]

In line with tptacek's comment, I don't think they need to add any major updates. I'd like to see them improve their site parsing engine, as it does some funky things on occasion, and I'd like to see them update the provided fonts, which mostly haven't changed from Marco Arment's last set and which I personally find a little quirky. (We don't need two extremely similar slab serifs, Elena and Tisa; why not replace one with something that's more distinct but still very readable, like Freight Text or even the semi-classic Charter?)

[henryaj]

Yeah, I don't see anything about "the next ten years" in there (other than that it will involve people paying money).

[austenallred]

Sometimes the most important part of “the next ten years” is continuing to exist