Instructables.com moves to a “pay to see” model

Instructables, the community craft blog of the handy set, has moved to a closed pay-only model, and the timer is ticking for legacy accounts. After 90 days from implementation rollover, people who do not pay for an Instructables “Pro” account will have their accounts “crippled”. Non-paying accounts will no longer be able to view entire instructables at once, print out projects or get a PDF, have a “favorites” list, and most perniciously, people won’t be able to view “secondary” images in instructable steps that have multiple images. (Even if you happen to be the person that created it.)

Some creators suggest that this new pay model breaks the Creative Commons license that most writers used on their projects, but Instructables says that creators don’t understand that the CC applies to everyone *except* the site where the content is published.

For my part, I’m removing my content from Instructables and will republish it elsewhere.  For those of you who would like PDFs of the projects, please drop me a line or message here, and I’ll email them to you until I can get the projects republished.