Could you offer something like a 1-month free trial with unlimited feeds, so I can seriously try out the service for my heavy reading needs. With 12 feeds, the trial is quite useless to me since I have to anyway use some other service to keep up with the other 90% of my feeds.
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Google Reader doesn’t shut down for 3 months, so you can continue to use it as you test out alternatives.
NewsBlur free accounts usually have a 64 feed limit but in order to help stem the load spike Samuel has taken the extreme steps of reducing free accounts to 12 feeds, turning off free account signups and removing the lowest tier of premium accounts.
Check out https://twitter.com/newsblur for updates as he works on things.
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But that doesn’t let me battle-test Newsblur for my real needs. I subscribe to over 100 feeds and read hundreds of articles every day. Alternatively, If I could pay for a couple of months (rather than the full-year) I wouldn’t mind paying to check out the premium service.
Of course, I could try to work around the constraints. But I think a 1-month (or even a 1-week) trial without feed caps makes much more sense. Or at least an option to pay for 1 month at a time. (If server-side capacity is the constraint, then it doesn’t have to be right now; let the sudden influx of people slow down)
64 will be far enough to get an idea of how it works. It will be a good half of your subs. The 12 limit is only temporary.
Seriously, $12 for a year subscription is too much for you to pay to “test” it out?
A better option would be to let me buy only one month worth of premium instead of making me pay out 12 times that amount for a year.
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If they (he) did that, then it would all go to Paypal. If you pay 1 dollar through Paypal, almost all of it goes in fixed fees.
@Lee, It’s $24/yr and yes, that is a non-trivial amount for someone who’s a student.
@Gnoupi, When I’m trying out NewsBlur, I don’t want to have to use another reader in parallel. I want to fully commit to NB and see how that goes.
Which is why I suggest the 1-month free options, after which people can be made to buy the premium service for 1yr.
$24 is temporary due to the huge influx of GReader users. If you wait a while it will go back to $12 as already stated by Samuel.
If you want a free version then everything is open source, set it up yourself?
I am considering that. Anyways, I don’t mean to crib and it was just a suggestion. It’s Samuel’s call and I’ll figure out the option that works best for me.
A 1 month unlimited free trial would also help to further decimate the service level providable currently. That’s going to improve as Samuel continues to expand his platform, but in the short term, if someone is not contributing the the solution, why would he be inclined to let them help destroy the level of service he’s able to provide to those who are?
Maybe he could handle the load from free and premium accounts separately in a manner where a possible overload from free accounts doesn’t affect the premium users. But I see your point; the current situation is a fairly decent local optimum.