I love pinboard! I started out with delicious until it got bought and got weird, then I moved to Google bookmarks but it's so crude. I need something that follows me on every machine. The magick is in being able to add tags.
It's no frills, just works, saves a cached version of the page when you bookmarked it, doesn't change in any way that is going to surprise you, did I say it just works?
I've wondered the same.. I actually subscribed to see what the hype was about; after using it for a few weeks I found it hard to justify the cost for such a simple and relatively featureless webapp
I only paid one up-front fee of about $10.00. It isn't subscription-based. That is stated quite clearly on the home page. Be sure you go to http://pinboard.in/ and not one of their rivals.