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Comment by akie | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know Blendle before, but I gave it a go after reading this article and have to say I'm impressed. Being the news junkie that I am, though, I can totally see how I would end up spending more than €50/month on this. Not sure if that's worth it for me to be honest.

I would totally buy a fixed cost contract though. My Spotify and Netflix are about €9/month, so if I could get quality journalism for €9/month (or even €20/month) I would totally be on board. But paying €0.25 per article... not for me.

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Blendle co-founder here. A flat fee is definitely something we're thinking about. But, the publishers have to be comfortable with it (and for newspapers, most of the time they are charging >$15 per month for a digital sub). Also, as an option, we'd always like to offer pay-as-you-go for users who don't want a subscription (a problem we set out to fix in the first place).

Their daily "best article" mail is quite good, I read more diverse and higher quality articles than I would have otherwise. I think they are still experimenting with pricing, I don't mind 0,25€ but some articles (looking at you Spiegel) were 1,99€, which is insane - I requested a refund, which luckily takes just a click. Annoyingly they don't show prices beforehand.

> Annoyingly they don't show prices beforehand.

Is that even legal in EU consumer law?

http://www.consumerhelp.ie/pricing-rules

"Shops and service providers must display their prices, and there are rules on how they must be displayed. You have the right to clear and accurate information on the prices of goods and services so that you can compare prices and make informed choices."

Perhaps the no-questions-asked money back policy changes this? Just guessing.

If you read a lot from a single paper you could buy the complete paper, if you've read article from that paper the price for that single article is removed from the paper's price. Some papers are quite cheap, for example, De Volkskrant (Dutch paper) is only 0.89 euro, a single article costs maybe 0.25, if you've read that article the paper will only kost 0.64.

But if you read a lot of different papers, that would still be quite expensive indeed

I fear that exactly this is the problem. There is a pretty big market for good journalism to be read online. People don't want to be bound to one source (traditional subscription) but I don't see micro transactions working here. Blendle has been pretty vocal about the number of users but I fear most of them aren't return customers. The interface and idea is good but a flat fee could skyrocket this.

I spend about that on a digital NYT subscription. It's not as good as a "netflix for news", but it fills out the gaps in internet coverage pretty nicely.

I think Blendle (or something like it) is a necessary step on the way to netflix-for-news, but I'm happy to wait this one out.

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