Month: November 2016

LastPass and 1Password

LastPass just recently made their sync feature available in their free product. Previously, it was only available in their $12/year premium product. So, if that was the only thing holding you back from using a good password management program, go ahead and give LastPass a try.

I’m using 1Password, and I’m still quite happy with it. I bought it back when it was sold as a software product rather than a service. So I paid for the Mac, Windows, and iOS apps, and I sync my passwords via DropBox. AgileBits has been good about continuing to support their “legacy” customers, and not trying to force everyone onto a subscription plan. (I think they learned a bit from TextExpander’s stumbles in this area, and have succeeded in not alienating their long-time customers.)

I was thinking recently about what I would miss if I gave up my MacBook and switched entirely to Windows. One of the things at the top of my list was the 1Password Mac application. They do have a Windows application, but it’s not great. Any time I know that I need to do any non-trivial organization of my password database, I always fire up my MacBook. I only do minor edits on the PC. Thinking about that got me curious as to whether or not AgileBits was working on a new Windows app. It turns out that they were, and they’ve released it, but only for their “team” service. It sounds like they’re going to release it for non-subscription customers at some point, but they haven’t committed to a date for it yet. So I’m looking forward to that.

I’m not actually opposed to paying 1Password $3/month for their paid individual plan, though that does seem a little steep to me. (I think LastPass has it right at $12/year. Of course, their apps probably aren’t as good as 1Password.)

By the way, if you happen to be in the market for a paid LastPass subscription, Humble currently has a software bundle running that includes a one-year LastPass Premium subscription (for new customers only).

Instapaper Premium is now free

It was announced yesterday that Instapaper Premium is now free. I’d been paying the old rate of $12/year for it, so it’s no big deal for me. I’m not sure what the current rate was, but I don’t think it was that expensive.

When Pinterest bought Instapaper a few months ago, I wondered what they’d choose to do with it. Discontinuing their only source of direct revenue from the product is an interesting decision. I thought that maybe part of this would be eliminating the ad-free option, but their blog post makes it clear that they’ll now be ad-free for everyone.

My first thought when I read an announcement like this is the old saying “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.” That does seem to be at least partially the case here, as someone from Instapaper pointed out in this Hacker News thread:

Pinterest receives value from the ongoing operation of Instapaper in the form of continued parsing improvements and aggregate information about links on the web, and that value is enough to justify our relatively small operating costs.

So, basically, it sounds like Pinterest uses the Instapaper parsing engine for other stuff, and gets value out of the aggregate data produced from Instapaper’s continued operation. So making the premium product free gets more people to use the service, giving them more data to work with. I guess that’s a win/win, if it’s entirely true, since it lets me keep using a valuable service, for free. And it doesn’t sound like they’re selling customer information to anyone else, or doing anything shady with it.

Despite all the usual snarkiness in that Hacker News thread, I think Instapaper is still a great product, and I hope it sticks around and continues to improve. Thinking about the costs associated with something like Instapaper, I can see how it could be sustainable with a fairly low budget. They only really need to store simple text and metadata, not images or video, so their storage costs can’t be that bad. And, for ongoing development, I think they probably just need to keep tweaking their parser to keep up with the web as it evolves. The basic products (web site and mobile apps) aren’t flashy and probably don’t need much ongoing work.