Pocket Wants You to Pay $5 Per Month for New "Premium" Service

Pocket is a pretty amazing service, but will you pay $5 per month for a premium version of the popular free app? The company just introduced Pocket Premium for Android and iOS, which promises to save your reading list forever, help you organize your saved content and adds an improved search feature.

You can try out the new service for just $5 or sign up for a full year at $44.99 for a 25 percent discount. The biggest advantage to Pocket Premium is the promise of a permanent library. The company will save a copy of every article you add to your queue, meaning it won't disappear even if the original article is scrubbed from the Internet entirely.

Pocket Premium also features "Suggested Tags" in an effort to automatically organize your reading list, and gets better at suggesting tags the more you use it. Finally, there's an improved search, which is able to scan the full-text of an article along with topics, tags, authors, keywords. That's a major improvement over the free app's search function, which only scans URLs and titles.

Pocket currently boasts 12 million registered users, and the company hopes a decent portion of those subscribers will consider trying out the new Premium service. These new perks may not be too exciting for casual users, but if you think of Pocket as a virtual library and not just a short term reading list it starts to make sense. As the company continues to grow it's also smart to give fans a way to support the otherwise free app, though how many people actually make the commitment remains to be seen.