Pocket, which lets you save articles and videos to view later, is introducing a paid option. Pocket Premium, which offers power users new features for archiving, searching, and tagging their saves, launches today for $5 a month or $44.99 a year. Seven years after the company began as a bookmarklet, and two years after making its apps free to build its base of customers, the save-for-later service says it's now big enough for a "freemium" business model to make sense. At a time when webpages routinely disappear without warning, Pocket is making a bet that users will pay for peace of mind. Whether the company is right will determine its fate as an independent business.

Starting today, Pocket users can purchase a premium subscription through its website, Apple's App Store, or Google Play. It's a model that closely resembles that of Evernote, which once tried to acquire Pocket and has remained a partner. Most freemium services only manage to get 5 percent or less of their users to pay for bonus features. Instapaper, Pocket’s best-known rival, has long offered a subscription for users who want full-text search, third-party integrations, and no ads, among other features. But Instapaper remains a fraction of Pocket’s size — it had 2 million users at the end of 2011, the last time it disclosed that number, and its Android app has fewer than 50,000 installs. Instapaper, which was created by Marco Arment, is now owned by Betaworks, which says it wants the app to become “the Dropbox for web content.”