Today, Feedly finally announced the details of their pro plan. At $5 (USD) per month it is slightly more expensive than for instance feedbin’s offer at $3/mo and they also offer for the first 5000 a life-time plan at $99. The monthly plan will be made available in the fall and the life-time plan will then cost $299 according to their Twitter account.
@Huicthgara only 5,000 will get the limited lifetime edition at $99. There will be a lifetime edition in fall. For $299.
— feedly (@feedly) August 5, 2013
So, right now the whole pro-plan is only available to those 5000 people, basically helping to fund feedly’s new infrastructure.
Is it worth it?
After just a little bit of considering I jumped onboard and gave feedly the money. Why? Mostly because they were among the first to come to rescue of those of use who got dumped by Google and because they haven’t messed it up yet. In fact, the product has become better and better and more stable over the last couple of months since I’ve used it for free, and I use it daily for multiple hours.
It totally agree with quite a few others out there that the initial set of pro-features isn’t really all that exciting (heck, HTTPS should be a free feature, which is something the developers agreed on) but if you think about how the pro plan has been announced, it feels more like a fundraising for more interesting things to come and the developers have definitely shown that they can take the initiative and go beyond just being a Google Reader clone.
But even if not, recent events have shown (esp. The Old Reader’s ping pong), that offering a replacement for a product that was provided by one of the largest tech companies out there is probably not something you can do in your spare time or without a clear plan and a big team. Even much smaller endeavors cost the developer time, effort and money due to things like hardware, bandwidth and so on. And these $99 feel like a way to me to keep a developer able to provide me with a very valuable service and also to improve said service in the future.
If this is worth $99 for you is something you have to and definitely should decide for yourself. For me, having a service I can rely on every day for the rest of this service’s hopefully long time on this planet, is worth it. If all you care about are pro-features, then you should probably wait for new round to appear, which I really hope will offer something more special than an improved Evernote intergration which also already quite good in the free version.
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