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Comment by elyseum | Hacker News Reader

So you liked Feedly for almost 10 years, but never bothered to support them financially. And now you complain that they go the extra mile trying to earn money?

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Exactly. It's so comical. You were never going to support them making their software, never going to upgrade, never going to provide any value to them in anyway even though they provided value to you for 10 years. Seems like this is a good thing for feedly.

The author acknowledged that though. He seemed to even had considered buying it, but thought it was not worth it. He eventually settled on something simple and free. It doesn't surprise me that running a simple RSS feed tool is not profitable.

There is very little simple about running an RSS aggregator, especially at scale.

I run one at scale, it doesn’t need to be done in a complicated way

What I’m saying is by running so many heavy services in the backend, relying on a series of API integrations to provide service and taking custody of swaths of sometimes sensitive user data, they make their own problems

The user doesn't really care about the scale, though. There are chrome plugins, local apps, etc. With dropbox and other similar tools, you can sync across devices and keep configuration stored in the cloud without much hassle.

I'm not saying that what feedly was doing was trivial. I'm sure it was expensive and required many developers, designers, etc. However, that doesn't mean that all the effort is necessarily important for the end user.

That's 100% reasonable. What's not reasonable is spending time to write a blog post in a tone that makes it seem like the product "is bad". The may not like it but the author wasn't a customer. It's the classic "I would buy it/pay for it if it only had XYZ or did/didn't do ABC." When in reality they were never going to pay for it, they just wanted something simple and free, which is 100% fine.

for apparently nonsense features. this isn’t a patronage model, it’s a product (and the free tier is not what’s being sold)

That was my point. They are not a charity, they are a business. It's not their job to build features for people who have been using the service for 10 year with no intention to upgrade. This person wants a simple free rss reader, all good.

(misread your tone completely)

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