Show HN: Building "RSS As A Service". Thoughts?
medium.com
medium.com
1) Love the domain, love the name. Simple. To the point.
2) Looks like a bad clone of the Medium homepage. Not that big of a deal, just what I noticed.
3) Needs a lot of UI work. A lot. Images don't look good on the retina macbook. Icons are all different sizes. The main blue for everything is too dark.
4) When I signed up... You sent me my password via email. NO! Stop that right now! In fact, if I could delete my account after that... I would.
5) When you add a feed, why is it an option to tell you how often to update it? Should just be automatic. Don't make me think about it. 5-15 min should be fine. 1 hr or more seems too slow. There are lots of API's like http://superfeedr.com/ out there.
6) Why is there an add funds button? What does that do, and why should I add "credits"?
7) Your doc page needs to be much more user friendly. Again, don't make me think.
Overall, I wasn't trying to be harsh. I like the idea, and you could have something in the future. The implementation as is needs some work though.
4) changed that 5&6) The idea is that there is a free tire, but if you need more computing resources you will pay for it based on how many resources you consume. Because of this I let you choose how many times you want to crawl your feed, as you have 50 crawls for free/day and if you need more (you have a lot of feeds or want to check them more frequently) you will have to pay for that. If you want you can also update all your feeds manually whenever you want by clicking the update icon. Funds could also be used to pay apps that are not free (the developer can choose to make a free or paid app).
IMO, you need to simplify what you are offering and be extremely clear and up front about your plans. If you want to make money, charge for it. Your vision reminds me a lot of app.net ... maybe you can go there and see how they structure their copywriting.
If you are only going to fetch at best every hour, you're making a hard case for me to not just build my own feed fetcher. There are lots of open source libraries that do this.