Wasted $30 on a Wayback Machine Pro subscription that did nothing extra

I got suckered into paying for a premium tier on the Wayback Machine last month thinking I'd get faster archive access or something. Turned out it just gave me a fancy dashboard and a PDF report of my saved pages. Regular free version does the exact same thing for digging up old dead sites from 2005. Anyone else fall for these supposed upgrades on preservation tools?

2 comments

2 Comments

olivia5733d ago

Wasted my cash on a similar upgrade for another archive site last year and it's the same story, just a shiny new button to click that didn't actually do anything useful. The free Wayback Machine already pulls up old GeoCities pages and broken blogs from like 2003 just fine, so what's the point? I guess if someone is paying for it, they're just buying the illusion of extra control, not actual features. It's a bummer because I really wanted to support the project, but they made it feel like a donation with a gimmick attached.

reese_lane294d ago

Oh man, I used to be one of those people who thought paying for archive stuff was a waste of money, but this actually made me reconsider. I figured the premium would just be some gimmick for people who didn't know better. But honestly, after seeing your experience and reading up on it, the free version does the same heavy lifting for finding old web pages. The only real reason to pay is if you're doing some kind of professional research and need the fancy report thing, otherwise it's just a tax on people who think paid must be better.