From “Request an Invite”
to Join Pinterest for free.

The browser tab says Pinterest: Catalog, Collaborate, and Share. The page is almost empty: a dark script logo, the line Curate and share the things you love, a Login button, and an email box next to Request Invitation. Under the logo, one person at a time introduces the site:

Evan, an architect, uses Pinterest to save his favorite drawings.pinterest.com, May 2010

Evan is one of ten, and the code of the page holds all of them, down to Ivy, a student, who saves ideas for her wedding (congrats Jack and Ivy). The small About link under the box goes to coldbrewlabs.com, not a Pinterest page. That was the company's name: Cold Brew Labs, incorporated in October 2008, renamed Pinterest, Inc. only in April 2012.¹

Behind that email box, Pinterest was small. Four months after launch it had only about 200 users, co-founder Ben Silbermann later said (reported by TechCrunch). He wrote to the early ones himself:²

“I personally wrote to the first 5,000-7,000 people that joined the site.”Ben Silbermann, Startup Grind interview (reported), 2012

So the Request Invitation box led to a site small enough for its founder to write to the first few thousand people who got in.

It was also the team's second try. Fast Company later reported that Silbermann and two partners had launched a shopping app called Tote in 2009: it saved favorite items, sent sale alerts and pointed to nearby stores. A year later Silbermann turned that into a place to show collections of anything.³

By November 2010 the empty page was gone. The homepage now showed the product itself, open to anyone, with a dictionary entry at the top: Pin·terest (pĭn'trĭst): n. a social catalog to collect and share things you love. In February 2011 the entry is for the verb:

re·Pin (rē·pĭn): v. to post another person's pin to your own pinboardpinterest.com, February 2011

The tab now says Pinterest / Home. Up top, a yellow box with a small picture of a pinboard: Pinterest is a place to catalog the things you love. Its only button: Request an Invite ». Below it is everything else. Eighteen category buttons, from Gifts and Food + Drink to Science + Nature, Wedding + Events and Fashion, and fifty pins on the first load, each one signed Pinned by … or Repinned by … with the name of the board it went onto: Stuff I want to eat, For Baby, Well-Appointed Desk. Under the pins, people talk: so easy to make on your own!, freaking adorable. At the bottom, the page keeps going: Fetching pins…

A visitor could read all of it, and even the comments. One poster in the feed says To live a creative life we must loose our fear of being wrong, and one of the comments on it reads: This is cool - but shouldn't it be "lose"? Anyone could see that conversation. Joining it took an invitation.

In July 2012 the box at the top says Pinterest is an online pinboard. Organize and share things you love. and the button still says Request an Invite ». On August 8, 2012 Pinterest dropped the invitations: anyone could now sign up with Facebook, Twitter or just an email address.⁴⁵ About three weeks later, the box has a red button:

The rest of the page is still open. The logo is now red script at the top center, there is a language menu (its code lists German, Dutch, two kinds of Portuguese and two of Spanish next to English), the closed Categories menu lists 32 topics plus Videos, from Animals to Women's Fashion, and most pins show their count of likes and repins: Judy's Strawberry Pretzel Salad, 51 likes, 196 repins.

For a few months, the homepage did both things at once: anyone could look, and anyone could join.

Then the door swings the other way. Between February and March 2013 the archived homepage shrinks from about 21 kilobytes to about 3.6, and by June it is this: the red script logo, one line, Collect and organize the things you love., and two buttons, Log in and Join Pinterest. The tab says just Pinterest. The pins are gone. The code asks for one more thing, a picture called logged_out_splash.jpg with the alt text Sample boards, but it doesn't show in the archived copy.

Anyone could join now. But a stranger who hadn't joined could see almost nothing. The text in the page's HTML fell from about 1,300 words of pins and comments in September 2012 to 24 words in June 2013, title and hidden buttons included.

In the June 2014 capture the pins come back, but only as scenery: blurred, darkened, behind a box. The box tells a little story, She used Pinterest to roll her first pasta, over a photo of fresh pasta coming out of a machine, then asks you to Join Pinterest to find (and save!) all the things that inspire you. Two buttons, Sign up with Facebook and Sign up with Email, and two numbers:

Nine months later, in March 2015, the box promises 15 seconds to sign up (free!).

The page's code also holds a footer row called Discover Pinterest:, a list of topics for the stranger: Gardening, Travel, Kids, Crossfit, Motorcycles, Vintage Slot Machines, Weddings, Humor, Quotes, DIY, Design, Animals. By 2015 Crossfit, Motorcycles and Vintage Slot Machines are gone from it; the other nine are still there in 2017.

In March 2015 They used Pinterest to plan a dream trip, and there are 30+ billion Pins to explore. By June 2016 He used Pinterest to start his rooftop oasis, and the number has changed its unit: 50+ billion ideas to explore. Pins had become ideas. Around the same time Pinterest renamed its Pin It button to Save; Adweek reported in June 2016 that the aim was to be clearer for the more than half of its users who lived outside the US.⁶ The tab now says Pinterest • The world’s catalog of ideas. (In this capture the background photo doesn't load, so the box sits on plain beige.)

What Pinterest's sign-up box asked for, 2010–2020

In the 2015 code the step after the email asks Male or Female. In 2016 it explains itself: Knowing your gender helps us show you better search results and recommendations. Choose male or female, or customize your gender.

The logo changes on these pages too. In 2014 and 2015 the script wordmark is at the top of the box; in 2016 only the round red P badge is left. In 2017 Pinterest retired the script wordmark for a bold sans-serif one, the first update to the logo since 2011, as reported at the time.⁷

The red P stayed, and it hides a pin of its own. Juan Carlos Pagan, who co-designed Pinterest's identity, says the custom logotype:

“transforms the letter “P” into a map pin, directly encoding the act of pinning into the brand mark itself.”Juan Carlos Pagan, Pinterest identity co-designer⁸

By June 2017 the box has stopped telling stories and says hello: Welcome to Pinterest. In June 2017 the line under it is The world's catalog of ideas, next to a black-and-white photo of hands holding record sleeves, over a blurred wall of record-collection pins. Google joins Facebook as a way in: Sign up with Google.

In February 2018 the line becomes Find new ideas to try, the form asks for your Age, and a big red circle in the corner adds Pinterest helps you find ideas to try. with a How it works button. The footer now lists Users, Collections and Explore. The May 2019 page uses a new set of pins behind the box: a campfire being built, a pie, a glass jar of fairy lights, a trench coat, a pair of zebra-striped sneakers.

A year later, in May 2020, the pins behind the box are the same ones, but the box has shrunk to Log in, Sign up and Create a business account. Across the top runs a banner: Stay safe and healthy. Please practice hand-washing and social distancing, and check out our resources for adapting to these times.

In June 2021 the box is gone. No pop-up, no blur. The name is back in the top-left corner, in plain bold letters next to the P, with About, Business, Blog, Log in and Sign up across the top. The page leads with one sentence whose last words keep changing: Get your next … green thumb idea, and below it a fan of pins that match: a bicycle basket of tulips, a monstera, a room full of plants, and a round blue arrow pointing down.

From 2021 to 2024 the captures share the same headline. The sentence is a rotator with four slides, each with its own color and pins: a green thumb idea, a weeknight dinner idea, a new look outfit, a home decor idea. So the captures from 2022, 2023 and 2024 don't show four new homepages; they show the same one, caught on a different slide. From June 2022 a yellow bar under the first screen adds Here's how it works, and by February 2024 the top bar has three new words on the left: Today, Watch, Explore.

One line stays put. The description Pinterest gives search engines for its homepage, hidden in the code, is the same in every capture here from May 2020 to October 2026: Discover recipes, home ideas, style inspiration and other ideas to try.

The June 2025 capture has the wall back, now with a header above it: Explore, About, Businesses, Create, News. Over a spread of food pins, in big white letters: Log in to get your ideas, and beside it a Welcome to Pinterest login form with a Notice at collection link in its small print.

But the archive caught other versions that year: in February 2025 the homepage still showed Get your next …. And by now the code records more about who is knocking than a browser name. It includes the country Pinterest guessed from the visitor's internet address:

So the 2025 wall is what Pinterest showed one visitor that it placed in Germany, on one day in June. It may not be what every stranger saw. It is what the archive kept.

On October 1, 2026 the homepage is a seasonal shop window. Conjure your best Halloween, a cluster of pictures (a sheet ghost, a dark cake, a skull with a candle, pumpkins), Join Pinterest for free and I already have an account. Below: Spooky season starts here, More bewitching ideas, and a section that shows off a tool: Search by skin tone. In the top bar, Explore and Shop, and a search box, like the one on the 2011 and 2012 pages.

The Halloween front page is also visible in the code, as a switch in the list of settings the page was served with: "unauth_hp_halloween_dweb": "enabled_updated_header_hero". Unauth homepage, Halloween, desktop web: the same word for a stranger, Unauth, that named the yellow Nag box in 2012.

FEB 2011 · Request an Invite2026 · Join for free

In 2011 a stranger could see everyone's pins and join only with an invitation. In 2013 they could join, and see almost nothing. In 2026 the door is open, and the window shows ideas before anyone signs up.pinterest.com, 2011 → 2026