[thaumaturgy]

Pinboard is my secret weapon for those obnoxious lists of citations I sometimes get to spackle onto the end of comments on the internet. I've been on there since December 27, 2010 (Merry Christmas to me), and currently have 8,698 bookmarks across 1,544 different tags. I'd have a few hundred more if I could hurry up and transfer all the open tabs from ios safari.

...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers. I've dabbled with the API enough that I could pull everything down on fairly short notice, but I sure hope I won't need to anytime soon.

[floatingatoll]

You're worrying about a business with a estimated minimum profit margin of 79%, using the most pessimistic assumptions I could think of. I wouldn't be worrying yet.

In 2017^: revenue was $259k, costs were estimated $17k, archives 31.8TBy, 126M URLs.

In 2020: revenue was $212k, costs were not specified, archives 82TBy, 192M URLs.

Archives are 2.58x higher, URLs are 1.52x higher. So taking the higher of the two multiples and pessimistically multiplying the 2017 costs of $17k (the cloud has gotten cheaper but let's ignore that), we get $44k in costs (this is probably too high by 2x), leaving a profit of $168k.

Users dropped from 29K to 19K, so you should start worrying when users reaches 5K, assuming that costs scale linearly with data (which they definitely do not).

In all likelihood, you probably don't need to worry until users reaches 2K. At current rate, that's probably about a decade, assuming ten more years of no changes to the site (such as mobile support) and etc.

^ https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/07/pinboard_turns_seven/

[idlewords]

Thanks for reassuring these message board Aristotles that my business is solvent!

A couple of data points to help you calculate:

* active users is not the same as paying users, it's people who did something in the last month

* costs in 2020 will be something like $17,000 for hosting plus $8,000 for hardware and a few thousand bucks in travel/hotel costs to the colo. So say $30K.

* the reason hardware costs are high in 2020 is... massive expansion, so maybe people in this thread are missing something

[floatingatoll]

I am momentarily saddened that my estimate of overestimate was overestimated. Thank you for the actual data, hello LTNS, and congratulations on 11 years :)

[bachmeier]

> ...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers

My story might be relevant. I only recently learned about Pinboard. $22/year isn't terrible, but it's just a bookmarking service. Free trial? Nope - you need to pull out your credit card and fork over $22. You get seven days to request a refund. (Will I actually get it? No idea who's holding my money.) He's happy to boast about competitors disappearing, but I use OneNote, and Microsoft isn't going anywhere. Yes, Microsoft is horrible, but they're also spectacularly wealthy. Ultimately I didn't subscribe.

Businesses need to ask from time to time if their business model is the right one for the current year. Expecting people that don't know you to give you $22 for a bookmarking service, without a trial period, might be wishful thinking in 2020.

[beardicus]

> but I use OneNote, and Microsoft isn't going anywhere.

"I use Google Reader, and Google isn't going anywhere."

I imagine requiring a credit card up-front cuts down on a ton of automated spam, and this tradeoff is worth it to pinboard.

[skeppy]

I tried Pinboard earlier this year. I found it too slow and was having issues with just general timeouts trying to categorize my bookmarks.

I requested a refund and got it straightaway. Along with a kind reply from the owner. No issues. (I think I had paid via PayPal so I was hardly worried). Also... $22.

Must everything be a free trial? There’s a lot of issues and costs associated with that for businesses (and increasingly regulation).

Now that I see this post from the owner, I’m inclined to sign back up again. I could have been one of those actually attempting to do a mass import when he was fixing it. And him being on 10-year old tech probably greatly contributed to my personal experience.

As the product itself goes, I think it’s worthy and useful. Having it be mobile-friendly will be helpful not so much for me but when I want to share a list of links to some other people I know who haven’t used a full-size keyboard in five years.

[idlewords]

Hey, thanks for reconsidering the site! It sounds like you caught things in mid-maintenance, or on a day when someone decided to crawl everything with no pause between requests.

For what it's worth, one feature I want to make work on the site is "create a sharable list of links to give people", it's a use case that comes up a lot.

[pcglue]

While you're here, add a "used none" filter (alongside existing "used once") in tag editor please?

[idlewords]

There's no such thing, though. All tags are on at least one bookmark by definition.

[pcglue]

But when I delete the last bookmark for a given tag, I still see the tag in the tag editor, even after a page refresh. And I can still click on the tag which brings up 0 bookmarks. Does it just take a while to be removed?

[cpach]

FWIW, it can happen from time to time that Pinboard is a bit slow, but IME it’s not very often. It mostly works fine.

[cpach]

To me it’s definitely worth the price. Dunno why he doesn’t do trials though. Maybe it’s not worth the hassle? Those interested in the service can get a good feeling for it by looking at the product tour and recent bookmarks. And if you sign up and don’t like it then $22 is not that much money[1]. (No idea if he does refunds or not.)

[1] In a Western country that is. I know $22 can be a lot of money depending on the circumstances.

[AJRF]

He does refunds, I got one from him, after a very short delay. I got the feeling it was a pain in the ass for him to do it, but he did it anyway.

I later resubscribed at a higher price (I am fickle and decided I did actually want to use the service) - which I wouldn't have done had the customer service been poor when I asked for the refund first time.

[idlewords]

It's not a pain in the ass at all; for Stripe it's a single click operation for me. With PayPal it requires a brief trip to their site.

Glad you decided to come back!

[AJRF]

Great to hear I didn't put you into too much difficulty!

On reading my comment back it seemed a bit snarky - just want to be clear to all it was nothing Maciej said in his emails around the refund that made me think it was a pain to do - he was perfectly accommodating - I just personally assumed that it would have been annoying admin to issue the refund.

Thanks for making Pinboard Maciej.

[bachmeier]

> And if you sign up and don’t like it then $22 is not that much money[1].

??

I'm not giving $22 to someone I don't know and then saying, "Well the service sucks, but it's not much money." He claims to give refunds, but the time cost for me - assuming I actually get it - would be far more than $22. Again, this is 2020, the world has moved on from this type of business model.

[aptwebapps]

Wait, the time cost of asking for a refund or the time cost of trying out a service you ended up not using? The former seems trifling, and the latter applies even if there was a free trial.

[cpach]

To me it’s definitely worth it since I think Pinboard is a really great service and I use it every day. YMMV.

[noscrewstoyous]

the world has only moved away from this model because the world is filled with fake unprofitable companies filled to the brim with vc money while trying to monopolize their respective markets with too good to be true pricing.

Pinboard is an old school business. You pay money for a service, and if you don’t like it you get a refund.

[CaptArmchair]

Well, ask yourself this: what's the concrete value proposition you're buying into? "bookmarking" in itself is way too general and leaves you wondering why you want to spend 22$.

You're actually (a) leasing usage of affordances provided by a system which someone else took the time to design and build, and (b) leasing hosting for your collection of bookmarks on someone else's system.

Why would you do that? Because you don't want to do any of these things: You don't want to spend time downloading and installing some bookmarking program, you don't want to design and build it yourself, you don't want to deal with storing data locally (even though it might be really a simple sqlite3 database).

Likely, you've rationalized you're lack of want through convenience, security, risk of data loss, someone else has done a better job at "solving bookmarking", etc. etc.

This is a line of reasoning which is perfectly valid. It's totally fine just subscribe to a service. However, it just so happens that your demand for such a service creates a market. And it's equally valid for others to charge you for what they offer.

Everything else is just opportunity cost calculations on your end. You don't want to fork over 22$? That's valid. But then you have to abide by whatever else the market is going to offer. If Pinboard ends up losing subscribers to Microsoft and sunsetting, then that has nothing to do with the quality of the service, but the very fact that potential customers are far too keen on compromising what they want, need and value in favour of the free, yet less-then-ideal offering from a corporate competitor.

The problem with "free" is that it's the very bottom of the barrel. It doesn't pay the operating costs of a service. The difference between Microsoft and Pinboard is that the former has the financial leverage to cover the costs of a "free" tier. It's this leverage that defines the edge when it comes to conquering markets, as it allows corporations such as Microsoft to set up a far more effective sales funnel. It just so happens that it also drives competitors out of a market, and stalls any form of innovation. As far as Microsoft is concerned, they have no need to build a Pinboard clone with feature parity, if customers are all too willing to abide with whatever OneNote allows them to do, even when that's less then ideal.

In short, there's simply no such thing as a free lunch. Even if the market tries to convince you otherwise. It's totally valid to feel that Microsoft is "horrible", but by the same token, customers eagerly relying on "free" services equally sets the bar for them to simply get away with "horrible".

[kevinskii]

It's not necessarily a choice of "Pinboard" vs. "Microsoft" vs. "create your own bookmarking website."

For me, it's "Pinboard" vs. "text file". At $11/year, I would choose Pinboard any time. I've been a subscriber for years and I don't expect anything for free. But at $22/year, I'll go with the text file.

[jdeibele]

I was going to correct you on pricing because I did a one-time payment of about $11 back in 2010. It used to be that there was a one-time price that incremented as people signed up. So really early people could have paid a dollar or so, I guess.

But it's now a yearly fee. Which is good for us grandfathered people, since it means the service will stay around.

[mcherm]

> currently have 8,698 bookmarks across 1,544 different tags

I'm at 17,614 bookmarks 2,530 tags. And it's incredibly valuable to be able to go back and find things, even things I bookmarked and categorized a long time ago.

> so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers.

I agree. In fact, that was the second thing I noticed, right after the declining revenue numbers. Earlier this year I went ahead and paid for 5 years of archiving service (my account predates the switch away from a one-time payment so basic bookmarking is free) partly because I trust maciej to still be around in 5 years but mostly because I wanted to be sure I'm supporting the site.

I STRONGLY want this to be profitable and successful because it is such a valuable service.

[truculent]

If you read his 10 year post he mentions the drop in subscribers is due to his neglecting much needed maintainence and feature additions while working on other commitments (such as The Great Slate). Having made the requisite upgrades and so on, he is now, presumably, able to devote more time to these issues.

[zimpenfish]

December 2009, 64179 bookmarks (2298 dead!), 2998 tags.

Almost all of those are automatic, though, from Twitter/Instagram/Pocket/RSS favouriting thanks to their own account linking and IFTTT.

[dna_polymerase]

I can recommend PushPin on iOS for that, it's another ten bucks (once) but well worth it if you are constantly on iOS devices and need Pinboard.

[thaumaturgy]

Nice! Thank you.