Instapaper is now free to use, with new premium features and social community

When it comes to apps that help you take a website and save it for reading later, possibly offline, there is a good chance you know about Pocket. A lesser known option is called Instapaper, which is now free to use, and has replaced the former app cost with a $3/month premium service that is packed with extra goodies.

Instapaper offers a nifty way of presenting websites, it essentially strips a website to just its plain text. Main image optional. Not only can you save the pages online, but Instapaper will let you take as many as 500 pages offline, saved directly to your device.

Formerly, Instapaper cost about $3 to install. Wanting to get onto more users’ devices, the new freemium approach brings a solid set of straightforward options to free users. For $3/month, or just $30/year, Instapaper premium unlocks a slew of powerful tools, check out our previous coverage of Instapaper for a lot of those tools.

What else is new?

• Premium users can now utilize text-to-speech on a created playlist of saved articles.
• User profiles and Browse environment.

The new Browse section, in conjunction with user profiles, allows users to save articles and create a sharable list that friends can browse. This has been a common social approach we’ve seen in many RSS readers of old, it should be a great way for Instapaper users to discover and share their favorite content with friends.

What do you say, can Instapaper pull you away from Pocket?

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