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Pocket is closing down
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Posted by Ken
May 22, 2025 at 08:02 PM
Mozilla is closing down Pocket shortly - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/future-of-pocket . I am assuming that anybody using it received an email message, but I thought I would share it here as well.
—Ken
Posted by satis
May 23, 2025 at 02:21 AM
Wow. Thanks for that info.
After using Pocket for over a decade I think I chose not to renew last month (most recent price was $45/year), and copied over several hundred saved Pocket articles to a folder in ReadKit, an RSS reader which also syncs to services like Pocket, Instapaper and Pinboard.
I decided to finally cut the cord because over the years they have done little to improve Pocket, while continuing to charge too much given competition like Goodlinks (a one-time $10, plus $5/year for updates, and you save the articles in your own cloud). So far Mozilla hasn’t sent me any notice about this, even though I’m still a nominal free-tier client of the service.
Mozilla’s income stream has been hurting for a while, and all their businesses besides a huge payout from Google have been a bust. They had a recent debacle soon after premiering the $9/month Mozilla Monitor privacy-monitoring service, after the CEO of the company it was the white-label for, OneRep, was revealed to have also founded multiple *people-search* companies in the past. And they only take a tiny cut of the $5/month for Mozilla VPN, which is just a white-label version of Mullvad.
Mozilla has been whittled down to 66 paid employees (with hundreds if not more volunteers), but salaries and benefits costs increased in 2023 from $284 million to $328 million. Their business is almost wholly dependent on “royalties” from selling default/optional status of search engines into Firefox, to the tune of (a slowly deflating) $495 million a year. This is cheap pocket change for Google, which is helping to prop up a tiny, almost insignificant competitor to help prove they’re not illegal monopolists, but these payments are potentially precarious if the US successfully forces Google to sell the Chrome browser.
Posted by Christoph
May 23, 2025 at 07:15 AM
That is disappointing. Sure, I didn’t use Pocket any more since I noticed the enshittifaction process a long time ago, I liked it while it was still called ReadItLater.
I find the reasoning a bit strange and lame. They claim the web has changed and now suddenly we don’t need such a service any more. I feel like the opposite is the case, I need it more than ever.
There is also that red herring argument that browsers now have their own reading mode. But they have this already for a long time, and most of all, this is not the main reason to use a service like Pocket. The main reason is the “read it later” functionality which they cleverly removed from the product name.
I mean, we are constantly flooded with hundreds of articles incoming from various sources like e-mail, social media, RSS feeds etc. Often there are interesting articles that I don’t have the time to read right now, but would like to visit later, e.g. on the weekend. How can you live without such a service? Manually store everything as bookmarks, synchronize with all devices, and then remove these booksmarks after reading?
I still have to find a good replacement. Most bookmarking services lack essential functionality, like showing the number of unread articles or the ratio between incoming and archived articles, so that you can check whether you’re overcommititng regarding articles “to be read”.
Interestingly and sadly, similar services such as Matter or Omnivore were also shut down in the last time.
Do you know any good alternative? I’m particularly interested in the basic “read it later” functionality, i.e. keeping and managing a list of “to be read” article URLs, with the possibility to tag and archive such URLs and search and filter over them. A nice reading interface (maybe with speed reader and text to speech) and scraping and archiving content along with the links are nice-to-have features, but not the most essential parts for me.
Currently I’m using Wallabag. But it’s slow and the web app UX is not really user friendly (e.g. for tagging articles), I’m still looking for a really good “read it later” solution.
Posted by Steve
May 23, 2025 at 02:27 PM
I use Pocket only to bookmark things on my phone that I want to read later. This is an old habit of mine, since I now have Zoho’s Notebook https://www.zoho.com/notebook/ on my devices.
You “send” or “Share” the Email, website, RSS feed, to Notebook and it creates a bookmark in the specific place you want.
Posted by Ken
May 23, 2025 at 05:08 PM
Christoph wrote:
>
>Do you know any good alternative? I’m particularly interested in the
>basic “read it later” functionality, i.e. keeping and managing a list of
>“to be read” article URLs, with the possibility to tag and archive such
>URLs and search and filter over them. A nice reading interface (maybe
>with speed reader and text to speech) and scraping and archiving content
>along with the links are nice-to-have features, but not the most
>essential parts for me.
>
>Currently I’m using Wallabag. But it’s slow and the web app UX is not
>really user friendly (e.g. for tagging articles), I’m still looking for
>a really good “read it later” solution.
I hear you. I have looked at numerous bookmarking types of programs and found most to be just so-so for my needs. I do use DIIGO for simple bookmarking when browsing. And I know that some folks like raindrop.io , but I cannot recall if there were privacy issues with this service. Let us know if you find something you like.
—Ken