Omnivore

» see omnivore.app as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the first time i heard of omnivore was the elevenlabs acquihire post in late october 2024. it was already dead at that point, just on the seventeen-day countdown.

jackson harper and hongbo wu launched the project in 2022. open source under agpl, no ads, native clients across web and ios. it was the kind of thing the read-it-later crowd takes seriously for about eighteen months, until the funding question gets asked. the read-later category had been a soft graveyard for years. pocket was alive but neglected, instapaper had bounced between three owners, readability was already long dead. omnivore picked up the people who had been waiting for the next clean version of that one app.

the funding question got answered on 29 october 2024. elevenlabs, the audio-ai startup, hired the founders to work on its text-to-speech reader. the hosted omnivore service shut down on 15 november 2024 and the company deleted user data on the same day. seventeen days from announcement to lights-out, which is fast even by the acquihire-shutdown standard.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it replaced ~

pocket and instapaper were the two old names. neither was anyone's favorite by 2024. omnivore was free, open source, no tracking, and that was enough for the read-it-later forum people to migrate over. for about eighteen months it was the answer to "what should i use now". then it was not.

the venture money did not so much run out as get redirected. elevenlabs got the people. the users got an export link and a deadline.

~ what got buried ~

the agpl source is still on github. anyone willing to run a postgres and a worker queue can host their own copy. very few people did. that is the modern lesson of open-source consumer apps. the source is not the product. the hosted service was the product.

elevenreader, the elevenlabs reader app the founders were hired to work on, ships text-to-speech for articles. it is not the same product. honestly, it is a different category, dressed in the read-later language for marketing reasons.

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