Leaving Instapaper? How to Move Your Read-Later List

Let's start with the part most migration posts get wrong: Instapaper is not shutting down. It's alive, it works, and it has outlasted most of its competitors. If you're happy there, stay — this post will still be here later.

This is for people who've decided to move for their own reasons, and want it to cost them an afternoon rather than their library.

Why people leave a service that's working fine

The reasons we hear are rarely "it broke":

• Ownership fatigue. Instapaper has had four homes: Marco Arment built it in 2008, sold a majority stake to Betaworks in 2013, Pinterest acquired it in 2016, and in 2018 it was spun back out to Instant Paper, Inc. — the team that's run it since the Betaworks days. Nothing sinister, and independence is arguably the best of those four states. But if you watched Pocket and Omnivore disappear, four owners in a decade makes you want a copy of your own.
• Read-later and bookmarks live in two places. Instapaper is a reading app. If you also keep reference links, you're maintaining two libraries and searching both.
• The link is all you keep. A read-later queue optimizes for the next article. It's less good at being an archive you can still search in five years, after a third of those URLs have gone dark.

If none of those bother you, genuinely: stay put.

Step 1 — Export from Instapaper

Instapaper's export is quick and it's yours:

1. Go to instapaper.com/user on a desktop browser while logged in.
2. Scroll to the Export section.
3. Click Download .CSV file. You'll get an instapaper-export.csv.

That file has five columns — URL, Title, Selection, Folder, Timestamp. The one that matters most is Folder, because it's doing double duty: it holds the reserved states Unread, Archive and Starred, and the names of every folder you made yourself.

Keep this file even if you don't migrate. It's the cheapest insurance there is.

Step 2 — Import into Cowpin

Upload that CSV as-is at Settings → Bookmarks → Import. No conversion step, no spreadsheet surgery.

Here's specifically what survives the trip, because "we support Instapaper" is easy to say and the details are where migrations actually go wrong:

• Your custom folders become tags. A save filed under "Machine Learning" arrives tagged Machine Learning. This is the part most importers drop, and it's the only organization you actually built by hand.
• Your unread queue stays your unread queue. Items in Unread come in as read-later. Items in Archive don't — you already dealt with those, and importing 4,000 archived articles as "to read" is how a new library becomes instantly useless.
• Starred stays starred.
• Highlighted passages come across as the bookmark's blurb, so the reason you saved something isn't lost.
• Duplicates are skipped, so a re-import after a failed attempt is safe.

One honest note on scale: very large exports can exceed the upload limit, and if yours does you'll get a clear message saying so rather than a silent failure. Tell us and we'll get you moved.

Step 3 — The thing Instapaper wasn't built to do

Once your library is in, the difference isn't the import — it's what happens to those links afterward.

• Everything you save is archived. Cowpin captures the readable content at save time, so when a site 404s, redesigns, or vanishes, the words you saved it for are still there and still searchable. A read-later queue full of dead links is the slow failure nobody notices until they go looking.
• Full-text search across the archive, not just titles — including "ask your library" if you'd rather describe what you're after than remember its name.
• Highlights and annotations on anything you save, exportable to Markdown, Obsidian, or Notion.
• A Pinboard-compatible API and a browser extension, so saving and scripting don't depend on us shipping an integration you need.

Step 4 — Leave yourself an exit

The point of moving carefully is not to end up somewhere you can't leave. So the same advice applies to us: export from Cowpin any time in Pinboard-compatible JSON, Netscape HTML, or Markdown. No plan required, no support ticket. If we ever stop being the right home for your reading, take it with you.

We'd rather earn the next visit than trap you into it — and after watching this many services die, that's the only promise worth making.

The short version

Export the CSV from instapaper.com/user, upload it at Settings → Bookmarks → Import, and your folders, unread queue, stars and highlights come with you. Then your saves get archived so they stop rotting.

Cowpin is free while we're finding our first users — every feature, no limits. Bring your list over.