readulatorInstapaper has been doing this since 2008 and it's still here, which after the last few years counts for a great deal. It survived two acquisitions, went independent in 2018, and is run by people who clearly intend to keep running it. If you're using it and it's working, that is a real thing you have, and this page isn't going to pretend otherwise.
Readulator overlaps with it and diverges from it in specific ways. Here they are, in both directions.
Side by side.
| Instapaper | Readulator | |
|---|---|---|
| Where saved articles live | Instapaper's servers, tied to an account | On your device, no account |
| Reading on more than one device | Yes, syncs everywhere including the web | No. One device holds your library |
| Platforms | iOS, Android, Kindle, any web browser | iPhone and iPad only, iOS 27 |
| Search across everything you saved | Premium | Included, and covers text inside saved images |
| Keeping an article after the page dies | Premium ("Permanent Archive") | How it works by default |
| Notes | Limited on free, unlimited on Premium | Highlights, unlimited, no tier |
| Listening | Playlists and AI voices on Premium | Included, with Lock Screen controls and artwork |
| Summaries | None | Written on-device by Apple's models |
| Recipes, films, albums, photos | Ordinary saved articles | Parsed and filed into their own lists |
| PDFs and Kindle | Premium, and it works well | Neither |
| Price | Free tier, or Premium at $5.99/month or $59.99/year | Free during the beta, App Store price not set |
Premium is worth what it costs; a service someone has to keep running has to be paid for. But the price is also the shape of the difference between these two apps. One is a subscription to a service that holds your reading for you. The other is an app that works on its own.
Where Readulator is different, and better for some people.
Nothing leaves the phone
No account, no login, no server-side copy of your reading. Summaries and text recognition run on the device using Apple's own models, so the articles you save aren't sent anywhere to be processed, and the app keeps working in airplane mode. Whatever you save is as private as your Notes app.
Listening is the point, not an add-on
Build a queue and it plays like a podcast: real Now Playing artwork, Lock Screen controls, per-article position, and text cleaned specifically for being read aloud rather than looked at. Instapaper's text-to-speech is good and it's behind Premium; here it's the feature the app is shaped around.
It sorts what you save by what it is
A recipe arrives as ingredients and steps. A film arrives as a card with cast and synopsis. Books, albums, games, podcasts, and profiles get the same treatment, each filed in its own list automatically. A screenshot of text becomes text you can read and search. A Bluesky or Mastodon thread arrives unrolled as a single article. Instapaper treats every save as an article, because that is exactly what it set out to do.
The paid tier isn't where the useful parts are
Full-text search, keeping an article after the page dies, and unlimited notes are the three things people most often hit the Instapaper paywall for. All three are just how Readulator works. Beta pricing is free and App Store pricing isn't set, so this isn't a promise about a number; it's a statement about which features are considered basic.
Where Instapaper is the better choice.
- You read across devices. Instapaper syncs to a phone, a tablet, a laptop browser, and a Kindle, and it has done for years. Readulator's library lives on one device. That's the single biggest reason to stay.
- You're not on Apple hardware, or not on this year's OS. Instapaper runs nearly everywhere. Readulator needs an iPhone or iPad with Apple Intelligence, running iOS 27.
- You save PDFs, or send things to a Kindle. Instapaper does both. Readulator does neither.
- You want a system with a decade of stability behind it. Readulator is in beta, written by one person, and hasn't shipped on the App Store yet. Instapaper has outlasted almost everything in this category, including Pocket.
- You have years of Instapaper archive. There's no import yet, so switching would mean starting fresh or re-saving by hand.
The short version.
Stay with Instapaper if
you read on several devices, you want a service you can log into from anywhere, you rely on PDFs or Kindle, or "it has been running since 2008" is worth more to you than anything on the other side of this table.
Try Readulator if
you read on your iPhone, you'd rather your reading stayed on it, you want to listen through a backlog instead of staring at it, or you save more than just articles and are tired of recipes and films landing in the same undifferentiated list.
If you're here because Pocket shut down rather than because you're weighing up Instapaper, there's a page for that: life after Pocket.
Free while in beta · iPhone or iPad with Apple Intelligence, on iOS 27
Not ready yet? Get one note when it ships.