Hacker News Reader

Comment by RamblingCTO | Hacker News Reader

Looks nice, but the value proposition sucks for 5 bucks a month

As a customer of theirs for probably around two years, I could not disagree more.

As far as online services go, Feedbin is absolute perfection.

They offer a clearly defined service. I give them money and they provide said service. It is rock-solid. One invoice email every month, and _absolutely nothing else_.

No changes. No feature creep. No upselling. No customer satisfaction surveys. Zero bullshit, zero annoyances. None. Zip. Zilch.

I used to pay for it but it there was slow response to bugs and no appetite for new features. You might call it feature creep, but there were feeds I wanted to read that it couldn't render, and OSS that could.

I would call that maintenance, not feature creep. And sure, I would expect those problems to be resolved, too.

It's just something I have not encountered myself.

Why would I want to pay monthly for a feed reader? What's the added value? Why feedbin? I was building something similar for newsletters with newsletterify.com. The value proposition was simple: clean inbox, help with information overload. I also wanted to add summaries and recommendations. Help me out with all the information overload. It would've been similarly priced. And I probably would've thrown in an RSS reader later. (I want to continue the project later this year, but now I'm drowned)

I don't have much to add to the discussion about feed readers, but I think you're seeing a good lesson on the value of actually shipping. It is harder than it seems.

Their value, for now, is that they managed to push it through and actually deliver a solid product (apparently, from what the commenter said), with a sensible form of self-sustaining, so users can rely on it still existing in 3 years time. That's also itself part of the value proposition, for lots of users.

I see that! But I also shipped 2markdown.com and I have a main gig where I also ship. I shipped newsletterify as well, it's up and running but didn't attract any users at all. So I'll do a second run later this year, with a rewrite and a different pricing model (adding a free tier).

Woah you have a good amount of products going on, no wonder you're swamped. Congrats on all those, and wish you good luck with them and future launches!

Thank you so much! It's a lot, but it's fun most of the times!

This is likely why no exec supported google reader and it shut down: people aren't willing to pay for it.

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