I don’t usually do “complainy” posts, but there was nothing recent along these lines when I searched for similar situations so here we are.
I was a happy customer
I started using pinboard.in when it was $9 for a lifetime account. Feels like it was around 2010 but I don’t have a hard date at hand. As a service it was excellent - it worked. The bookmarklet worked fine it was always up and although it felt minimal, it didn’t need to be anything other than what it was. If you were assessing the service as it stood back then it was an example of how small tech can be a real gem.
In Feb 2021 I converted to a yearly plan after being contact by the owner, Maciej. I replied to his email and I got a response the next day.
Username change - support silence.
At the end of 2021 I started cleaning up all of the places that I was using my real name online1. Pinboard was one such place. So I submitted a request to support. Months past and I had no response. I didn’t expect an immediate response, but I did expect a response. Which I didn’t get. So in February of 2022 I deleted the account.
2026 - I need a new bookmarking service
Between the years of 2025 and 2026 I began rebuilding my digital life after a few years offline working as an arborist and a lecturer in arboriculture between 2022-2025. In 2026 and I was once again looking for a bookmarking service (I’d been using HackerNews favourites and a very, very messy combination of normal browser bookmarks as ad-hoc bookmarking service). So I went back to pinboard.in as logical choice as there was a clear money back guarantee.
I signed up for a one year plan with archiving. I nearly did three years, but decided on one year. With my fresh account in hand I tested the service by adding five bookmarks. Notice that every archive link has a 500 error? Thats the archival failing. 100% failure.
So I contacted support to execute a full refund. My previous experience had shown me that when money was the topic of support, a reply was fast. Given the time sensitive nature of the situation, I felt ok about things. Here’s the timeline.
I’ve yet to receive a response and no more bookmarks have been added.
Chargeback
One the 11th of July, I initiated the chargeback. The case was accepted and I was refunded on the same day. The bank contacted the merchant on the 18th July and the dispute was opened. The refund was issued on the basis that if I lost the case I’d have the money taken back. If no response was issued from the merchant by the 4th September then I was likely to win the dispute automatically. Which apparently, I have.
What did I use instead?
I ended up running a self-hosted linkding on another Pi in a cupboard in my house.I’ve been serving it through a Cloudflare tunnel (basically the same setup as this site) and configuring it with singlefile to get a full html backup of all bookmarks. So far singleclick has 100% success rate on over 300 bookmarks that I’ve added in that time.
Conclusion
I’m not Maciej so I don’t know what’s going on with the service. Maybe the guy is having a hard time of late. It’s hard to know but I’ll assume good faith. There’s probably a reasonable explanation for how this all worked out. This was simply my experience. The only thing I’d directly suggest to Maciej is to retire the archiving part of the service and supporting singlefile. I’d probably have remained a customer if that was how it all worked.
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A decision that I’ve now since reverted. ↩