AppleInsider Staff
Popular Google Reader alternative Feedly opened its premium subscription service to all comers on Monday, granting users access to a highly requested article search function and other features for a monthly fee.
After a limited 5,000-person test run earlier in August, Feedly, one of the top alternatives to Google's erstwhile Reader, has opened its for pay premium subscription service to all users.
Dubbed "Feedly Pro," the premium offering gives users one-click saves to Pocket and Evernote, priority placement for support requests, HTTPS and the ability to search for articles within an RSS feed.
According to the company, the subscription money will help scale up the Feedly cloud infrastructure to support additional apps, as well as further development of planned features and customer support. As for the upcoming feature set, Pro users will get the chance to vote on what rolls out next, though the details of the voting system have not been revealed.
Pricing starts at $5 per month, or $45 per year, and those interested can click here to sign up. Along with a Web client, Feedly also has a universal iOS app, which is free to download from the App Store.
Charles Martin
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
10 Comments
Gosh, I wonder what it does...?
I really like the service (would like it even more if we already had some Reeder updates to support it on all devices), and would, without hesitation, give them $2 per month for the service that is now free. But $5/mth for a service that does not really store much data for me? My website account, with 5 GB, unlimited traffic, free PHP and mySQL etc. is $4. I do not need search, I am not paranoid enough to require SSL for RSS (these are public articles anyhow) and there is Pocket and Evernote support in pretty much every client application.
Sure, the service is pretty new and they have to create revenue somehow. I just do not think the balance between the free and the paid service is quite right yet (I think the approach e.g. Newsblur takes with limiting the amount of free feeds is more convincing). But maybe they will add some other nice things to the "pro" offer over time.
My first reaction, what the hell is it?
Being from Google it must involve spying, but aren't there advertisers interested in paying for it?
Oh well, it's my Feedy dinner time.
Gosh, I wonder what it does...?
Funny you should say that. I went to the site to read up on it, but there's no way to access anything without "logging in." In one second it went from "I wonder if there's value in this for me?" to "Can't be bothered." It may be perfectly innocent, but it's not good business practice to ask for information from me before even telling me what the product does. Even if it doesn't make me uncomfortable it's a barrier to getting information and that's a bad idea when the average visitor has an attention span shorter than
My first reaction, what the hell is it?
Being from Google it must involve spying, but aren't there advertisers interested in paying for it?
Oh well, it's my Feedy dinner time.
Gosh, I wonder what it does...?
Well, reading the article would have helped... "Feedly, one of the top alternatives to Google's erstwhile Reader" is actually pretty clear. It is not from Google, but it does, more or less, what Google Reader did (manage RSS feeds and keeping them in sync across devices).
Funny you should say that. I went to the site to read up on it, but there's no way to access anything without "logging in." In one second it went from "I wonder if there's value in this for me?" to "Can't be bothered." It may be perfectly innocent, but it's not good business practice to ask for information from me before even telling me what the product does.
Yeah. You really can't blame their web site for being too verbose. Originally Feedly was pulling in feed subscriptions and read/unread data from existing Google Reader accounts. Since Google Reader shut down in July, they now manage feeds in their own engine, but still use a Google login for authentication... without any explanation (and there is none) that is definitely impossible to understand. And really, now that any reliance on Google is dead, they should establish an own login system. (Google Reader was the only Google service I used and I would really like to just kill my Google account, but now I only use it to log in to Feedly... aargh.)