I use GoodLinks for all kinds of reasons:
It’s private. Everything I add to my queue is stored on my devices and syncs through iCloud.
No ads, no data collection.
No need to create an account.
It’s a value-priced, one-time purchase.
The UI is clean and pretty on all my devices.
It’s got a Mac app, which is table stakes for me. (I don’t want to use a browser to read articles from my queue on a Mac.)
It’s a snap to export an article as a plain-text, markdown, or PDF file.
There are things it doesn’t have, however:
No highlighting.
No full-text search.
No Readwise integration. (I gather it’s possible to use Shortcuts to get text selections ported over to Readwise, but if getting things into Readwise is a big part of your workflow, GoodLinks may not be the app for you.)
None of these are deal-breakers for me since I don’t use read-it-later services as article repositories and don’t use Readwise. If I need to archive the full text of an article, I save it as either a PDF or markdown file and will do my highlighting and note-taking in the app I’ve sent it to. Once I’ve read and processed an article, I delete it from my queue.
(I explained my GoodLinks workflow here. I’ve refined it a bit in the interim. I now use Zoterobib to create a quick citation rather than typing it out myself and I often use Goodlinks’ built in copy-to-markdown functionality to paste the article I want to save directly into an Obsidian or Devonthink note. Goodlinks automatically ads a YAML header with title, URL, and author to the markdown file—very handy!)
I’d love to give Readwise Read Later a spin, but I suspect I will be well into my dotage before it exits closed beta.