Read-later services have come and gone since Instapaper’s debut, but the original survives. The app and service both remain free, although you can opt for a ‘premium’ subscription, which adds archive text search, text-to-speech and speed-reading functionality.
It intentionally had no social features — I designed it solely for personal utility, not sharing or promotion. Instapaper was the first service that combined quick saving with a text-optimized reading view and offline access.
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Before the iPhone app was possible, the text-content parser was a technical and practical need: articles had to be small enough to download quickly over 2G and stay loaded in memory on the first version of Safari for iPhone.