Is Pocket Premium worth it?

I noticed this update to Pocket this morning.

Pocket, the service that lets users save articles, videos and other types of content to consume later on mobile devices and the web, is adding a paid tier. On Wednesday, the company launched Pocket Premium, which adds permanent archiving (rather than just link caching), tagging and search capabilities on top of its basic free capabilities. Pocket Premium is $4.99 a month or $44.99 a year.

(Via GigaOM)

My first thought was that my Instapaper subscription already gives me access to my archives with full text search but then, again, Instapaper doesn’t capture copies of all my articles as far as I am aware.

On the other hand, I can capture copies of the stuff I want to retain with Evernote (I am about to renew my Evernote subscription for another year). There is probably a way to configure a recipe in IFTTT to automatically capture items saved in Pocket (or Instapaper for that matter) into Evernote. You can already save full articles in Evernote from Pocket and Instapaper manually.

Another option is to use an app like Reeder to save articles to Evernote too (also a manual process).

I like Pocket. I’ve switched back to Instapaper because of the highlighting feature (which prompted me to renew my subscription – $3 for 3 months) and it works pretty well for me. The Instapaper parser could use some work so I still have Pocket as a backup.

Still, for people who are not Evernote users, just want to save stuff and keep it for later reference and like Pocket (there is a lot to like) then the Premium subscription isn’t a bad deal at all.

(Update 2014-06-08): I just realised there is another option that works pretty much the same way as the Pocket archival option. Pinboard, the awesome bookmarking service, offers this as a $25 a year premium upgrade:

For a small annual fee, Pinboard can download and store a copy of every page you bookmark, for your own private use.

Enabling archiving will also enable full-text search for your bookmarks.