Exporting everything from Instapaper, and what the file actually contains

Instapaper's own export lives in Settings, under a section simply called Export, and it produces one thing: a CSV file covering your whole account, sent to your email as a download link rather than handed over immediately. It works on a free account. What matters more than the click path is what a CSV of links can and cannot carry once you have it. It is not a copy of what you saved to read.

That question has more people asking it than usual. Pocket, the read-it-later app closest in spirit to Instapaper, announced its shutdown in May 2025 and had deleted every account by that October. A lot of people who had never thought about exporting anything went and checked whether their own read-it-later app could get their data out. Here is exactly what Instapaper's answer contains, and where the gaps are.

How do you export your data from Instapaper?

The process runs on instapaper.com, not inside the mobile apps, and Instapaper builds the file rather than downloading it straight away.

1. Sign in at instapaper.com/user. This opens the Settings page, where account-level options like export live.
2. Scroll to the Export section and click Send .CSV file to your email. This covers your whole account in one file, not a single folder.
3. Wait for the email from Instapaper. Instapaper's own documentation notes a large library can take a few hours to generate.
4. Open the link in the email and save the CSV. Keep it somewhere you actually control, not just a Downloads folder you empty every month.

Instapaper's own export and download documentation covers this process, plus the separate PDF, ePub and RSS downloads available for individual reading lists.

Do you need Instapaper Premium to export?

No. Export sits under Instapaper's general account documentation, not on the page listing what Premium adds. A free account can generate the same CSV a paying one can.

Premium, at $59.99 a year, buys reading features instead: full-text search across everything saved including archived pages, unlimited notes rather than the free plan's monthly cap, PDF uploads, saving from X, Kindle digests, speed reading, an ad-free site, and Permanent Archive, which is the setting most relevant to what follows.

Does the export include the article text, or just the links?

Just the links, as far as anything in Instapaper's own documentation says. This is the detail worth getting right, because it is easy to assume the opposite.

Instapaper stores the text of what you save so you can read it inside the app, and Permanent Archive, a Premium feature, keeps that stored copy indefinitely even if the original page disappears from the web. But Instapaper documents that as a reading feature, on its own separate page, entirely apart from the Export and Download page that describes the CSV. Nothing in either page states that the stored article text, or any highlights and notes you added, travels out with the account export. The CSV is the record of what you saved and where you filed it, not a copy of the saved pages themselves.

The PDF, ePub and RSS options are not a way around this either. Those bundle whichever reading list you pick, capped at the first 19 articles per bundle, and they exist for reading on another device rather than as an account backup.

Is Instapaper still the right tool for you?

For a genuine reading queue, yes. Full-text search across an archive, speed reading, text-to-speech playlists, a permanent copy of the words themselves: that is a reading app doing its job well, and none of it is a reason to leave. If what accumulates in your Instapaper account is mostly things you intend to sit down and read start to finish, keep using a read-it-later app. Exporting a CSV does not change what Instapaper is for. The same question comes up for other apps in that category too, and GoodLinks users can find the equivalent walkthrough for getting everything out of that app before they ever need it.

Where the rest of what you saved belongs

Not everything that lands in a read-it-later app was ever going to be read that way. Some of it is reference: a product page, a portfolio, a piece of type, a room, something saved because of what was on the page rather than to read every word of it. Instapaper was not built for that half, and it shows: no grid, no way to look at what you saved rather than open it and read.

That is the gap Muse sits in. It is a visual library on your Mac: a grid of what you kept, not a queue of what to read. Worth being just as plain about its limits here as about Instapaper's. Muse has no reading mode, and like the Instapaper CSV, it does not archive the article text either. What survives if a link later dies is the preview, title, tags and any note attached to it, not a saved copy of the page. Muse also has no dedicated Instapaper importer the way it does for Raindrop or Eagle, so moving anything across is manual: open the CSV, and paste the individual links worth keeping into Muse, which pulls its own preview for each.

Export it, whether or not you are leaving

Whatever you decide about where the reference links end up, the CSV itself is worth generating on a schedule, independent of any plan to switch anything. Pocket is the concrete case for why: an app plenty of people trusted with years of saved reading, gone within months of the shutdown announcement, taking every account that never got exported with it.

The export costs nothing and takes minutes, most of which is just waiting for the email. The only bad outcome is not having one on the day it turns out you needed it.