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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

I dont understqnd this attitude. I use feedly and like the author of tfa I don't pay them any money, so I ignore the junk. This is the price you have to pay when you get something for free. I have a lot of sympathy for feedly: it seems like a really hard thing to get people to pay for. What does the author think feedly should do with its free tier?

Before feedly I self hosted TinyTinyRss for a while (kind of slow) and before that Google Reader. And before that Newsblur. I never paid for any of them and now I have more than enough paid subscriptions for stuff. Reading rss feeds just doesn't make it over the line of things I'd be willing to pay for.

Edit: I pay £10/month for Adobe Creative Cloud and get Photoshop, Lightroom, XD, Illustrator, etc. I pay ~£8/month for Office 365 and get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. All massively rich and powerful tools. Why does feedly imagine I would want to pay £5/month to read rss feeds?

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>Why does feedly imagine I would want to pay £5/month to read rss feeds?

Microsoft and Adobe need massive scale to charge prices that low. They're each probably 10,000x-100,000x larger than Feedly in terms of end-user licenses.

For a service I find useful enough to choose over a free alternative, I'm happy to pay $5-30/month to fund development and maintenance. I don't want all my software coming from the Microsofts and Adobes of the world.

> What does the author think feedly should do with its free tier?

Not the author, but I think they should restrict the free tier to a small number of feeds rather than nag. Asking users to pay to get more is positive whereas asking users to pay to reduce nagging is negative.

Absolutely 100%, myself and my friend were discussing the same about products. An upgrade should be about getting the same benefits but more. 10X speed upgrade does make product look bad. Instead reducing number of feeds you can have or grouping etc but a bad product is not a free tier. It is nuisance to deal with in our busy lives.

> I ignore the junk. This is the price you have to pay when you get something for free.

clearly it isn’t, or the author wouldn’t have been able to move to a free alternative without any junk to ignore.

I probably didn't express myself sufficiently clearly. I'm pleased that the author has moved from a Web app to local, open source apps. Definitely a good move, particularly on mobile. What I don't get is going to the effort of writing a blog post about the annoyance of using the free tier of a service provided by a commercial business. That tier is there to let people try the service. It's not surprising that the experience isn't friction-free: it's not meant to be.

> It's not surprising that the experience isn't friction-free: it's not meant to be.

This is an argument for the intentional creation of bad software.

Or for not having free tiers.

> Edit: I pay £10/month for Adobe Creative Cloud and get Photoshop, Lightroom, XD, Illustrator, etc. I pay ~£8/month for Office 365 and get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. All massively rich and powerful tools. Why does feedly imagine I would want to pay £5/month to read rss feeds?

Because Freedly doesn't have Microsoft or Adobe's budget and needs to have its costs covered?

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