> "The app is free for now, while the founders consider monetization options involving freemium services, search offerings and mobile CDN models."

Yes, this always ends well. Every download Spool gets loses them money. For every download Instapaper gets, Marco makes money.

And yes, Spool may be more feature rich than Instapaper, but when is being "on steroids" a good thing?

Hi Martin,

I'm one of the founders. Thanks for your feedback.

The business model on this is pretty clear. It works like DropBox. Most users are casual users and cost us almost nothing. Heavy users have a clear pain point and will pay for it. Our alpha users have expressed this to us. The hard part with a model like this is, of course, figuring out the right cut-off for a free account which is why we want to see how users use it before imposing any restrictions.

Let us know if you have any thoughts. You can email me directly at avichal@getspool.com if you want to share anything in private too.

Thanks, Avichal

You edited out a key part. Here's what you cut:

"The app is free for now (in private beta), while the founders consider monetization options involving freemium services, search offerings and mobile CDN models."

Can you blame them for being free while in beta?

Also remember that Instapaper was a free web app before it was an iOS app, and that Instapaper Free for iOS existed as recently as early 2011. It didn't seem to hurt Marco's sales.

Yes, you're right, I forgot that Instapaper had a free version for a long time. I took out the "in private beta" parenthetical because I thought it was a way to include a link to the beta rather than as a way to specify how long "for now" is. I can see you're interpretation now too.

I will say that the big difference between Instapaper and Spool is that while Instapaper did have a free version from the get-go, it was feature limited. It's going to be hard trying to balance the feature sets between the two when their users are already used to having the whole thing for free.

But you don't know what's being offered in beta! Is it the whole service? Or are they staggering feature releases while testing load?

We'll be offering the whole service, just letting people in off the list slowly so we can make sure everyone has a good experience as they come in.

Avichal, Spool Co-Founder

You seem to have a lot of negativity - what's wrong with starting free to get a foot in the market? Also, being "on steroids" is and has always been a good thing. They also say that it's an "evolved" version of Instapaper.

I agree, free at first worked for PayPal.

Except paypal works with money almost exclusively. Thus, it's easy for them to monetize it.

> what's wrong with starting free to get a foot in the market?

Are you VC funded and have $12 million sitting in your bank account? Then go and try to grab your part of the market with giving things away.

Are you self funded/bootstrapped and are worrying about how to pay next month's rent? Better make sure you make some money soon. Giving stuff away for free won't help you much with that.

They have both had startups before with successful exit.

This is why I think it was shortsighted for Instapaper to reject outside funding. As much as I like Instapaper, it is very much still a single-platform app with very limited scope (text-only), and the app hasn't been updated in several months. Meanwhile its competitors (like Readitlater and now these guys) are getting funded, rolling out features, and attacking this market with much greater resources.

Marco has actually stated that he has 4.0 pretty much ready to ship as soon as iOS 5 comes out. However due to being built against the 5.0 SDK he can't release it any earlier than that.

I'm a big fan if Readability. I guess, no matter what, there are lots of options.

Just watched their demo on TC disrupt and it looks wonderful. I've been really into the content scrubbing systems that have been coming out as of late. This reminded me a lot of my current favorite, Gimme Bar (http://www.gimmebar.com), but much smoother of an experience. Signed up for the beta. You should too.

I was on stage for that. Whee!

I like this a lot but it does seem more like a feature for Instapaper and (my fave) Read it Later. I would expect them to get acquired or copied.

Hi,

We're hoping to build a large, successful business. There is a lot of technology behind this that is a legitimate barrier to entry so we don't expect this will be copied in any meaningful way soon. We'll be writing blog posts to explain details of why what we've built is so difficult to copy in the coming weeks.

Both of those teams are of the "ground-up" variety. I wonder if they have enough capital to acquire something like this.