Why is pocket free

You can search by article text, topics, tags, authors, and more, making it easy to quickly find anything in your list. Learn more with our complete guide to Full-Text Search. Highlighting while reading has enormous benefits. It helps you engage more deeply the text, comprehend dense subjects, and easily revisit to key passages in the future.

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Pocket Casts has been a paid app since it first launched in Back then, we had a small company to run and our families literally depended on the money we made from app sales.

It was a business model that paid the bills, but often caused confusion with our customers: "I've already bought the iPhone app, why do I have to pay again on Android?!

We have the backing of some amazing partners, all of whom come from the world of public media, and firmly believe in an open-access approach. For a while now, we've felt that charging for our apps conflicted with their core values of being free and available to everyone. We knew we had to do something about it, and so in the spirit of Shifty Jelly of yore, we did. After many months of hard work, we're excited to share version 7.

The Android version is currently rolling out, and the iOS version is in review with Apple and will be available soon.

We also have updates for our web and desktop versions rolling out today. We'd like to go into a bit of detail about what this means for you today and going forward. Most certainly! We aren't locking any existing features behind a paywall. Even more importantly, we will continue to update the free tier with new features and functionality.

We fully expect the free version will be the way the vast majority of our users access our app. Maybe it's a long read and you don't have the time, maybe you found it while you're at work and want to save it for when you get home, or maybe you're trying to research a topic and you're gathering multiple resources to explore later on.

Whatever the case, with a browser extension, or the Share function on your phone, you can send the article to Instapaper. There, the app will download it into a text-friendly version that you can read even if you lose your internet connection. You can sort your articles into folders, or have them read aloud to you if you prefer listening to them. This approach is ideal if you want to save interesting stories to read at your leisure.

Pocket works similarly but with a stronger emphasis on research and flexible organization. While you can use it as a simple reading list, it also has several features that are ideal for gathering information for a big project. Instead of using folders, Pocket has a robust tagging system. This lets you sort articles into multiple categories and find them easily later. Pocket Premium will even download copies of your links, so if the original is changed or deleted, you can keep the information for your own reference.

It functions as your personal database of sources that you can refer back to over and over. You can use it for casual reading, but it's also built to work as a reference tool. Instapaper and Pocket are both ostensibly designed to be simple reading apps, where you save a link and then read it later. However, their differences when it comes to organization and reading experiences make for a subjective comparison.

Which one is better for you will depend heavily on what you want to save articles for casual reading versus research and how you prefer to read speed reading or on a Kindle versus text-to-speech. With all that in mind, we focused on these key categories. Click on any one below to jump to the area that's most important to you, or skip to the end to see our complete comparison table. Notes and Research. Sharing and Discovery. For the most part, Instapaper and Pocket support similar platforms.

Each offers apps for Android, iOS, and the web for reading the articles you've saved. They also offer browser extensions for common browsers like Chrome and Safari. That means you can save articles from most places and read your saved articles on most devices. But there are a few key places where the two differ. Instapaper offers a Kindle app for Amazon's eReaders that let you read text-based versions of your saved articles.

These text-only versions are designed to be easily read on eInk displays. You can transfer the articles via USB, or set up wireless delivery via a newsletter that can be automatically downloaded to your Kindle as frequently as once per day. Once downloaded, the articles are available even when you're away from wifi.

The Premium subscription also lets you send articles directly to your Kindle via a bookmarklet. By comparison, Pocket is only available as a standard Android app on the Kindle Fire. If you want to read articles on an eInk tablet, Pocket has a similar partnership with Kobo, but those are far less common. Pocket, on the other hand, has its own API to integrate with other apps and services and let third-party developers create their own clients.

Having said that, Pocket's app directory looks pretty outdated. To wit, the page still prominently features Google Reader , which went the way of the dinosaurs in Both Instapaper and Pocket are supported by Zapier , which means you can connect either of them to thousands of apps. Click ahead to our section on how to automate Instapaper and Pocket to learn more. Instapaper offers speed reading and more font choices, while Pocket offers better text-to-speech. When it's time to read, Instapaper and Pocket offer similar basic reading features.

You can choose between light, dark, and sepia color schemes, set custom brightness settings for reading mode, and pick from some font options.

Pocket only offers a choice of one serif and one sans-serif font, while Instapaper has several fonts to choose from. The choice of fonts differs by platform, so, for example, you'll find more font choices on iOS than on Android. Both services also download all of your articles so you can read them without an internet connection, which is perfect for reading on the subway or a plane. The two differ more when it comes to text-to-speech.

Pocket can read articles aloud as long as you're at least connected to the internet when you start reading an article. If you lose internet, you can finish listening to an article, but you'll need to reconnect for each new article. Pocket uses its own text-to-speech engine across platforms, so the voice will sound the same everywhere. In our experience, it sounded very natural. You can adjust the playback speed up to 4x normal speed, or down to 0.

You can start listening to your entire feed of articles in a playlist, a feature which Instapaper charges for. All of Pocket's reading features are included for free. Instapaper also offers text-to-speech but with some more limitations. It uses whatever text-to-speech engine is available on the platform you're using. On iOS, for example, the engine reads one word at a time in a robotic tone, which doesn't flow very very well. Android sounds a little better, but neither is quite as natural as Pocket's text-to-speech.

If you change platforms frequently, your listening experience will be inconsistent. You can turn playback speed up to 2x normal speed without paying, but Premium users can go up to 3x. The difference between 2x and 3x starts to push the bounds of what a person can reasonably process, so most free users should still be satisfied. Instapaper also offers a unique speed reading feature that displays the text of an article one word at a time.

You can adjust the speed of this feature from to words per minute. Free users can read up to 10 articles per month this way, while Premium users can use it with no limits.

Pocket doesn't have this feature at all, so if you're into speed reading, Instapaper is the way to go. Pocket also offers a minor but uniquely helpful feature. When reading articles, the app automatically switches between scrolling or paginated views. If you want a permanent resource of links, go for a bookmark manager instead. Out of the box, Pocket works across several different platforms with extensions and apps available for every major browser, mobile, and tablet.

When you save a story in your web browser, it's instantly available on your phone. Cross platform access on Pocket is easy to use whether you're tech-savvy or have a harder time getting web apps to work for you.

With browser bookmarks, you can get cross platform access but it takes a little bit more work. With Google Chrome and Firefox , you can sync your account across machines by logging into the browser on all the machines and mobile apps you use. In Chrome, sync your mobile bookmarks and view them from your desktop. Microsoft Edge can easily sync bookmarks "favorites" , but only across Windows 10 devices.

Safari users can easily sync bookmarks across Apple devices. There are intricate syncing solutions available for most browsers, but if you want a simple solution, Pocket and Chrome offer some easy-to-use options. Pocket gives you offline access to articles you've saved in their mobile and tablet apps. You'll just want to be sure to open up the app when you're connected to Wi-Fi to download them. This way you can keep up with your reading list when you're traveling and are out of range of a Wi-Fi or data signal, or when you don't want to use up your data by loading your reading list.

This is one of the fundamental ways in which Pocket differs from bookmarking and is a clear advantage when it comes to using the service. Another big advantage of Pocket is that it allows you to save videos as well as text for offline viewing. This is not something that's possible with bookmarks. This file can be used to import your links elsewhere if you decide you no longer want to use Pocket. With Chrome bookmarks, you get a little bit more control over how you can export your links.

With Google's Bookmark Manager you can export bookmarks by folder rather than the entire list. You could use this method as a workaround to share a folder of links with someone else.

Firefox and Microsoft Edge also make it easy to export bookmarks to import them elsewhere. Safari makes exporting bookmarks so difficult that it shouldn't even be considered if you're a frequent bookmark user and don't want to be locked into this choice.

Winner: Google Bookmarks for the most control over how to export your bookmarks. On Pocket, you can share individual stories with other Pocket users -- and you can share one story with multiple users or email addresses simultaneously. Pocket also makes it easy to share directly to Twitter, Facebook, or to send the link to Buffer.

A relatively new feature is the ability to share " recommended reads ," allowing you to selectively share items from your reading list to your public Pocket profile. You can't share your entire Pocket list without sharing access to your Pocket account itself or without relying on a third-party service.

With native browser bookmarks, there are no sharing options. You're simply going to have to open up the link and share it however you would any other link from your browser. Winner: It all depends on what you want to do. Want to easily share one link? Pocket is the better option. Want to share your entire list of links, a third party bookmarking service may be for you. Pocket recently introduced features that make it easy to explore the most popular stories being saved by others.