Wow, the irony is Pinboard, the very service that championed the idea of "Don't be a free user" (1) is now shutting down (edit: sorry, ok not shutting down officially but apparently it's in a free fall for quite some time and nobody gives a damn (2)). Their article argued that free services often turn into pump-and-dump schemes, while paid services promise sustainability and better support. Yet here we are, witnessing the demise of a paid service that couldn't sustain itself.
It's a stark reminder that even paid models aren't immune to market forces and operational challenges.
Maybe the real takeaway is that no business model is foolproof, and unless you can self host something you can never know when and how it will end.
It could also be that maciej has enough paying users that he can afford to coast and be unresponsive, losing some users in the process, in order to do whatever else he's doing these days.
The about page says 30,000 active users; most must be paying since there is no free service it seems (though there used to be way back in the day; I used it myself). If half of those are paying, that's $330K a year. Not bad.
nice screed, but it's hard for me to make sense of it as a paying and satisfied user.
similarly it's hard for me to make sense of "this paid service failed, so it's a proof of a failing concept.", given the sheer amount of successful paid services out there.
I mean.. we would be here all day if we were listing the past failures of free services on the net -- what's the point?
Could success perhaps be a bit more complex than whether or not you charge a monthly fee alone?
my takeaway : running a low/no-staff service is hard, and people will perceive any possible gap in customer service as "in freefall", even though everyone is well aware of the human condition.
It's a stark reminder that even paid models aren't immune to market forces and operational challenges.
Maybe the real takeaway is that no business model is foolproof, and unless you can self host something you can never know when and how it will end.
(1) https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
(2) https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ask+pinboard