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If anyone working for feedly reads this: SSL/https should not be a premium feature. Please make it available to everyone.

Update: they tweeted "HTTPS is currently a pro only feature. Will extend it to everyone when we have a way to fund it." (see https://twitter.com/feedly/status/364292745487065088)

Seriously. You shouldn't have to pay to expect a reasonable amount of security as a user.

So, as a user, you have a right to a free product on your terms and conditions?

That's an overreaching interpretation of parent's post. Besides, the "rights" issue is a red herring. Making an analogy - and yes, I know it's not accurate, it's an analogy -, people don't have a the "right" to a free car, but if I am going to offer free cars, surely we can agree they should have breaks.

The idea that because it's free it's above all criticism is simply unreasonable.

Personally, I don't think requiring payment for SSL is wrong, though.

> The idea that because it's free it's above all criticism is simply unreasonable.

Solution: shut down the free version. Addressing complaints from free users who demand things captures absolutely zero value when you're a struggling startup with too much else to do and limited resources still trying to make a viable business. Freemium doesn't work unless you're swimming in VC money and only care about user growth, not MRR growth.

Shut down the free service and no one will get hooked to your product, and choose a another free service to start with, and maybe even pay for it later.

Providing both free and payed tier is the way to go, especially in the commodity market segment like RSS readers, unless you are in a niche without too much competition.

I disagree. RSS readers have a significant long tail expense per user. I worked at Bloglines. Pretty much every one of those free users have extra little RSS feeds that nobody else subscribes to that you have to crawl, handle invalid rss/xml for, update and keep unread status on. At scale, that is the most expensive part of operating an RSS reader, and it's not worth it.

I agree with your point that keeping RSS user is not free. But, from the users perspective, RSS readers are a commodity. You can't sell them subscription unless you provide them a free ride to actually check and hook up to your service. The only reason that OP is successful is having a business model working is that he already has a large userbase which was acquired largely because it was free.

Security? Where do you see security issues outside of login data (which is already over HTTPS)?

This seems like a privacy feature (something not necessarily everyone cares about when it comes to their feedreading), not security.

How do you think the authenticated session is maintained?

Don't want the NSA reading my I can haz cheezburger feed

They've got the certificates so they'll see your lolcats either way.

Any site viewed over plain HTTP is susceptible to content injection by ISPs, public wifi providers, employers, etc, basically anyone between you and the server. At best it's annoying, at worst it's a security hazard.

And as someone else mentioned, the session cookie is still transmitted in plaintext, which effectively compromises your Feedly account.

Not to be too glib about it, but for God's sake, who cares? It's my Feedly account. It holds my read/unread status for my daily newsfeeds. What's the big hacker target here? Spoofing that I've already read Hacker News today? Subscribing me to feeds I don't want? I encourage Feedly not to waste time securing that on my behalf.

For the functionality Feedly provides, plain HTTP is a reasonable amount of security. I also, up until fairly recently, received news via a bundle of paper left on my doorstep. Shocking, I know.

Looks like they are just decorating the "Pro" plan with "features".

Have a look at kouio, it's only accessible over HTTPS: https://kouio.com

Also worth mentioning, with kouio, paying customers will never be competing with freeloaders for resources :-)

> Will extend it to everyone when we have a way to fund it.

Is it really that expensive for them to run? Last time I heard it was a a minuscule amount per request, and peanuts for the certificate itself.

Of course not, but pro will be funding their infrastructure as a whole

That depends whether they are using a CDN. CDN's charge a lot more for HTTPS

Does $5/month sound a lot for a product/service from a real business? How much do you charge for your product/service?

As a user, I know that a lot of "just $5 a month" services add up quite quickly, especially if they're not tools you use every day or as part of a workflow.

Probably what annoys me most about this is that HTTPS was already there (I've been using it for a good month or two). This would imply that the costs were already spent, the infrastructure was in place and it was working just fine.

Great that they've settled on a business model, but I feel like if you are going to have a free tier that HTTPS should be part of it.

Authentication is already SSL.

Why exactly is that? By far most people do not care at all that other people are (theoretically) able to see what they are reading. I certainly don’t at all.

I do not think HTTPS is in any way a required feature for a feedreader. It’s pretty perfect as a premium feature.

There are plenty of reasons to prefer secure browsing by default. Perhaps I subscribe to feeds that would be flagged as "suspect" by programs like PRISM[1] and XKeyscore[2], and would like to make the NSA work at least a little bit to find that out.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore

So, then if it's that important to you, give the people giving you the cover of HTTPS some money, stop being a cheapskate.

It so happens that I consider HTTPS by default for all users a requirement. A problem which a pro subscription does not solve.

And you can pay for that feature. I have no real stake in the game here, but I'm failing to see why that is a must-have feature for every user of the service.

Feasibly, the lack of HTTPS for a subset of users could be used as an attack vector against Feedly, which could surface information about me that I do not want revealed even if I were a Pro user using HTTPS.

Personally, think we should encourage an ecosystem where https is a given, rather than feature. I would prefer that companies saw this as part-and-parcel with being a responsible service provider.

FWIW, I'm a big fan of Feedly, and have upgraded to Pro.

Let's tell Heroku to stop charging for the SSL endpoint.

Security shouldn't be a premium.

Huh? Isn’t this about privacy, not security?

Since Google Reader went down, I've found I waste less time. I used to use Reeder as my front-end, but they've been slow to update their desktop app. I realize I'm "missing" things I used to keep up to date on, but the net gain is a lot more time I used to spend consuming what I suppose was superfluous content. For me - it's been kind of a nice change.

I had the same experience when I stopped using Opera and didn't have the RSS reader anymore. I do miss reading webcomics regularly, but the productivity gain is nice.

You know something's wrong with your RSS reader when it has a support queue, and people are willing to pay for bumping to the front of it.

Are there any products with actual users and no support queue?

Google Search? I don't recall the last time I had to send Google an email because their search wasn't working for me. Over the top example, but an example nonetheless.

Search support is for website owners, who are users as well. And I'm pretty sure that support queue is long.

That doesn't mean people are willing to pay for faster support or even need it. Feedly offers a pro account but obviously decided against crippling the free account. I'm very happy about that. If people are willing to pay they get priority support as an additional value. And as bonus: if the support queue is short once it is implemented in the support software/workflow this feature costs feedly nothing.

You're unfair. The other option would be to offer no support for free plans and only have support for those who pays.

That's great and all, but my RSS Service has SSL by default, no support queue, and is only $2/month or $16/year. Everyone is a user, and everyone is treated the same. No ads, ever.

https://www.bulletin.io

Not again with the lifetime accounts...

Only 5,000 lifetime accounts. Tiny in comparison to the 12 million+ users they have.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/19/feedly-launches-sta...

Will they even last 20 months at which point lifetime account becomes advantageous? The Old Reader sure didn't.

The Old Reader didn't last because they didn't have a business model.

Fantastic. Making the users the customers is something I heartily approve of. It aligns the interests of the service providers with the interests of the users, and means they have to compete on service, rather than spending their time finding ways to make people click on ads.

Honest question: why do people pay for "pro" RSS services? There are enough out there that I don't feel I would ever need to - I was using oldreader until they shut it down to everyone and now use digg reader - is there specific functionality I'm missing out on by not using these premium services? There's always the whole adage of if it's free then you could lose it, but with the amount of readers out there it seems like I could hop to and from services.

Because it would be nice to not have to constantly hop to and from services as they die from lack of resources?

Because it would be nice to not have to periodically have to re-learn everything as the app you're familiar with dies and you have to switch to an unfamiliar one?

Because good software is worth something?

Seems ironic to have a "lifetime" pro option, as its predecessor's lifetime was cut short.

we live until we die, and unfortunately sometimes we die earlier than we want to :)

I suppose it's less ironic when you consider that its predecessor's lifetime was cut short, in part, because they didn't charge for their product. ;)

Can they fix the whole "keep unread/mark as read" shortcut key debacle first?

I'm surprised they don't just stick a banner at the top and call it a day.

I was wondering how long it would take for them to find a business model.

selling https access doesn't sound like a good one for me, this should be a basic feature with NSA and who knows who else listening in on everything.

If you want some privacy, you have to pay for it. Is that really that unreasonable?

Well, my reflex response is yes. Transport security seems like an odd thing to call a feature for a feed reader. Of course it's possible that it's a brutal cost multiplier for them - I'd be interested to know.

SSL probably doesn't do squat against the NSA.

They aren't selling https, they're selling early access to https, plus search, priority support, and some other stuff.

https://twitter.com/feedly/status/364340330172137472

I would be put off paying $99 for a lifetime account. These should be available up to 5,000, but users should be able to still opt for the $5 or $45 options.

I would rather pay a monthly/yearly fee.

The price is $5/month and $45/year when these 5,000 lifetime accounts run out.

Apparently you didn't read the article. Or the first sentence.

"feedly pro will be generally available this fall for $5 per month (or $45 per year)."

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