What you need to know
- Starting February 19, Instapaper’s Send to Kindle feature will no longer be free.
- Keeping the feature will cost you $6 per month or $60 per year.
- The service will be paywalled because processing and emailing articles to Kindles is server-intensive and costly, according to Instapaper’s lead.
If you rely on your Kindle for distraction-free long-form reading, you may soon pay more for that habit. Instapaper, a popular read-it-later app, has confirmed its beloved Send to Kindle feature is moving behind a paywall.
For the uninitiated, Kindle devices are known for their E Ink displays that mimic paper, but they aren’t exactly known for having a great web browser. Instapaper helps by letting you save articles on your phone and then sending them to your Kindle. This process was easy, convenient, and, until now, free.
The change is due to the work happening in the background. Instapaper’s lead engineer, Brian Donohue, explained on Reddit that sending articles to Kindles uses a lot of resources. Each time you request a Kindle digest, Instapaper’s servers process the text, collect images, save the data, convert it to a Kindle-friendly ePub file, and then email it to your device.
With over a hundred thousand people signed up for these digests — the vast majority of whom are on free accounts — Instapaper has essentially been running the service at a loss. By putting the feature behind a subscription, the company aims to cover those rising server and bandwidth costs.
Beginning February 19, you’ll need to pay for Instapaper Premium to keep using the wireless Send to Kindle feature. The subscription also includes extras like full-text search, unlimited notes, and a permanent archive of your saved items. The cost is $6 per month or $60 per year.
Kobo owners get a free pass
Interestingly, this isn’t an across-the-board tax on e-readers. If you happen to own a Kobo, you can breathe a sigh of relief, Android Authority reports. Kobo’s integration uses Instapaper’s API instead of the email system Amazon requires, so that feature will stay free for everyone.
If you don’t want to pay, you still have options. You can manually download files and transfer them to your Kindle with a USB cable, or use Amazon’s Send to Kindle browser extension. However, these methods aren’t as smooth as Instapaper’s automated digests.
