Instapaper has a free plan and Premium at $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year. Readwise Reader comes with full Readwise at $9.99 a month billed annually or $12.99 monthly, with a 30-day trial, and adds RSS, newsletters, PDFs, EPUBs and deeper highlighting.
The facts come from Instapaper's and Readwise's official pages, checked on October 6, 2026. Prices and features can change; check each service's page before paying.
This guide is part of the Guide to saving articles to read later, which orders every guide on the topic.
How much does each one cost?
- Instapaper: according to its Premium page, the free plan lets you save unlimited articles, videos and other pages, sync across web, iOS and Android, and create folders. Premium costs $5.99 per month or $59.99 per year.
- Readwise Reader: according to Readwise's pricing page, Reader is included in the full Readwise plan at $9.99 per month billed annually or $12.99 billed monthly, with 30 days free. The FAQ on that page places Reader in the full plan; Lite, at $5.59 per month billed annually, is meant for the daily highlight review. Reader's FAQ confirms those USD prices.
What does Instapaper Premium add over the free plan?
The Premium page lists full-text search across all your articles, a permanent archive (a stored copy even if the page disappears from the internet), a PDF reader, unlimited notes (the free plan has a 5-note monthly limit), Kindle integration, AI voices and text-to-speech playlists on mobile, speed reading and an ad-free website.
What does Readwise Reader add?
According to the Reader page, it brings read-later articles, RSS feeds, newsletters, PDFs, EPUBs, YouTube videos with transcripts and Twitter threads into one place. It offers web highlighting through the browser extension, full-text search even offline, text to speech and Ghostreader, a GPT assistant for asking questions or defining terms. Highlights sync to Readwise, which exports them to note apps such as Obsidian or Notion. It runs on web, iOS, Android, Mac and Windows, with extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
How do I get my data out of each one?
- Instapaper: the export documentation offers a whole-account CSV by email and PDF or ePub downloads per list, 19 articles per bundle. The steps are in How to export your Instapaper articles.
- Readwise Reader: Reader's export documentation lets you download your library as CSV, your feeds as OPML, and a ZIP with your uploaded files and the full text of saved articles.
Can I move from Instapaper to Reader?
Yes. Readwise's migration guide says to connect Instapaper from Integrations in Reader; anything new you save to Instapaper also reaches Reader. If articles are missing, Readwise suggests uploading your Instapaper CSV.
Which one fits how you read?
This is an original KeepAnalog suggestion, not a recommendation from either service:
- If you want a simple article queue, free Instapaper is enough; Premium makes sense if you need full-text search, PDFs or Kindle delivery.
- If you highlight and move notes into another app, Reader is built for that, but the price covers all of Readwise.
- If you want RSS and newsletters in the same place, of the two, only Reader advertises them on its own page.
Highlighting does not guarantee you remember more; we review that in Does highlighting help you read?.
What if you would rather read away from the screen?
To read offline, How to save web articles to read offline compares options. If you prefer paper, KeepAnalog turns eligible public links chosen by one person (HTML pages or PDFs) into a monthly printed issue. Nothing is printed or charged until that person approves the issue. For now, KeepAnalog's pilot is in Argentina only, with no delivery in the United States.