Pinboard pricing model

I am a knowledge addict, and always has been. I was reading as many books as possible, and the advent of the web has been a marvelous gift for me. But I soon realized that I needed some tools to manage this knowledge and supplement my memory. It started with pen and papers, then I used a lot the PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) such as the fabulous Psion Series 3 and Series 5, the various smartphones, and finally the bookmarks-in-the-cloud service Delicious

But as Delicious closed, I searched a replacement, and found Pinboard, and was hooked. Not only it offered the same functionalities as Delicious (and more), but if was fast and sleek, with a minimal no-nonsense design that I favor.

It also had an original pricing system: you paid a one-time fee of $0.001 per the number of current users to get access for life. E.g $9.26 if there was already 9263 paying users and you wanted to become the 9264th. The goal was to entice people to register now rather than waiting, even though it may not have scaled. (see Pinboard.in Pricing Model: Fixing Their Math).

Alas, it could not be sustained, so in 2015 it adopted a more mainstream yearly fee scheme: $11 / year. New Pricing Policy (Pinboard Blog)

But we, old timers, kept our lifetime access we bought before the change. We were basically free-riding the new wave of customers...

Of course it could not go on, so last week, Maciej, the Pinboard author, suggested we voluntarily switch to the yearly fee scheme. And I did it gladly, Pinboard is for me a model of what web sites should be: sleek, fast, and efficient (and not re-selling your private data). At the opposite of the bloated monstrosities that a lot of sites tend to be nowadays.

Long live Pinboard!