The demise of Omnivore. Back to Readwise.

I should have known better than to trust Omnivore, a free read-it-later service. With expensive server costs there was no way it could remain free. Unfortunately instead of making it subscription-based they're abandoning it and moving to a company that's making a different reading service that is "free". No thanks. I've learned my lesson.

To be fair there are efforts underway to make a self-hosted version available but that is something I am not interested in as there are already other paid services where I don't have to worry about maintaining any sort of infrastructure.

Frankly I'm a bit pissed off not only because I really liked Omnivore, but also because I had been a customer of Readwise prior to finding Omnivore and had been locked in to their $7.99/month pricing. After trying Omnivore I liked how it worked and thought it was better at parsing web pages (in cases like Substack substantially better) than Readwise's Reader app. I quit my subscription with Readwise and in the time since the price has gone up $2/month for the yearly pricing. It is the most likely candidate for my money so that hurts just a bit.

There are other options, mainly Pocket and Instapaper. Unfortunately those sites really aren't options because their premium tiers don't handle parsing of paywalled content. It's a ridiculous limitation. Omnivore and Readwise Reader both parse the pages in-browser to get around that problem. I'm not sure why Pocket and Instapaper haven't done the same after being around so much longer.

There are a lot of other advantages to Readwise/Readwise Reader so I'll probably swallow the cost but it would have been nice if the Omnivore developers would have tried making it a sustainable business instead of just abandoning it and moving elsewhere.