Hello,
For years I've been a heavy user of Pocket and sometimes Instapaper. They are both amazing apps and also heavily geared towards providing an exceptional reading experience for articles. Over time, I got a little frustrated at how those apps handled links to videos and photos. So I built LaterBin. Mostly for myself at first. I feel like it treats video and photo links more like first class citizens in the way videos and photos are organized inside the app. There is a distinct place for both and it gives you the ability to create custom photo galleries from your bookmarked photo links.
Oh and there's also support for PDF files. Why? I guess because I wanted to. Friends would often send me PDFs via iMessage or WhatsApp and I felt like I never had a good place to stash them for later. Same with photos. LaterBin supports saving photo files that you might receive through a messaging app, something Pocket and Instapaper do not support right now. I hate cluttering up my iOS photos app with random photos that I still might want to keep somewhere.
The app is totally paygated and subscription based (with a free trial). Sorry. This will invite much criticism but it's fine. There is an accompanying web app / desktop experience to complement the iOS app.
Where the incumbents are better: Both Pocket and Instapaper have offline support and way better article readers. My article reader is basically the native mobile Safari reader on iOS (which is pretty decent in my opinion). LaterBin doesn't have offline support for articles, which kind of sucks. If you want a super nice app for reading articles, highlighting stuff in articles, text-to-speech; stick to what's out there.
What I think is better about LaterBin: How it handles video / photo bookmarks, saving pdf files and photo files, the ability to pin bookmarks to the top of your list, setting reminder emails, the ability to lock down the app with Touch ID / Face ID, and a text-to-save feature that I don't believe other apps have.
That's the main gist. The other big thing for me is privacy. The links you bookmark can be very personal and private. It could be links to medical articles, mental health stuff, etc. You could get a pretty good sense of a person's interests by looking at what they save online. LaterBin makes use of very limited and basic analytics that has nothing to do with the content you bookmark. There are zero analytics that track what you save, what you view in the app, how often you view it, etc. There are no ads and I hope never will be. No bs engagement push notifications or marketing emails.
LaterBin is not exceptionally pretty. Mostly native UI components and lots of third party libraries. I couldn't design my way out of a paper bag. But it's nice enough.
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@michaelzsigmond I really like the honesty in this. It’s refreshing!
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This is a great idea, but it is actually a pretty hostile first experience.
It’s not clear that there is no free “tier” or that nearly all functionality will be stripped without a subscription. As an example there’s no way to skip the subscribe screen on first use—unless you force quit and reopen.
Not signing up for a subscription, I saved a link from twitter to LaterBin but was unable to even read it without subscribing.
Tapped the x to close the subscribe screen and saved article had been deleted.
I think the biggest changes shouldn’t be related to functionality, but simply messaging of the paid model and more clearly communicated. I think this is especially true because the competition mentioned does have expansive free use.
@tylerh Thanks Tyler. Not being able to skip the subscription page was intentional on my part. I know a lot of people won't like the app being totally paygated in this way and definitely see how it could be seen as hostile.
Tbh, I don't think I will offer a free plan of any kind but can see I need to rethink onboarding to make this more abundantly clear.
"Tapped the x to close the subscribe screen and saved article had been deleted."
-> Not sure what happened here. Without a subscription, functionality is locked down but the bookmark shouldn't have been deleted. I'll look into this.
Sorry you didn't have a great first experience but I appreciate you taking the time to provide feedback. I intend to make some changes to user onboarding in the next version.
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I love this concept! what's the subscription pricing? And any plans for android?
@gamebiz Thanks Scott! Subscription is $3.99 / month in US. I built the iOS app and web app myself. Unfortunately, I don't know how to build Android apps. Right now this is a side project for me. If I can grow subscriptions enough to support getting an Android app built, I will. I'd love to get to that stage.
@guillaumebardet Thank you Guillaume. I got caught up thinking about video and photo that I neglected thinking about audio links. I definitely will though. I have one major feature release that I'm working on now...once I get through that, I'll look at audio more specifically. Appreciate the suggestion.
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