Are free, quality RSS readers becoming a service of the past? Today feedly revealed feedly Pro, a paid subscription service to premium features on feedly. As perhaps the most popular RSS reader on the market, feedly could be setting a costly precedent for other RSS readers.
For $5 per month feedly offers subscribers:
- Article search
- Http browsing
- One-click save to Evernote notebooks
- Access to premium customer support
To encourage subscription, feedly offers a limited lifetime edition for $99.
feedly says the money raised from premium subscriptions will finance the company’s hardware needs and development costs. In the future, Pro features will be available outside of the feedly desktop, and feedly users themselves will be able to vote on the Pro features feedly should develop next.
Along with this announcement feedly promised to continue developing free features for feedly: “If anything, feedly pro makes us more sustainable and enables us to innovate faster,” the company posted on its site. feedly is not the only RSS reader to focus on premium memberships; Digg Reader, too, has pledged support for premium features. If this trend for paid features in RSS readers continues, I worry that features essential to a useful RSS browsing experience will soon become accessible only to those users who can pay out of pocket.
What do you think of feedly’s paid offerings? Will you subscribe to feedly Pro soon?
I certainly will NOT subscribe to a commercial RSS feed service! The added value does not justify the extra charge.
Ha the one-click save option to Evernote would be nice, but charging people to read free blogs seems like bad business. Then again Google didn’t want to keep their free reader running anymore either…
Bookmark favourite RSS feeds for quick connect, however when getting feeds out for sharing may become a problem and lead to paid services.