Disappointing to see you doubled your premium service price today.

Many thanks … and I need to say that I’m really loving Newsblur, especially the UI at the dev site.

(Looks like the homepage still suggests a 12-feed limit for free accounts, though.)

Anyhow, go take Shiloh for a walk. :slight_smile:

are you kidding me? I was thinking about this and at first thought I’d eagerly hand over as much as I pay for email (20/yr).

But on further thought that’s not enough. I use Google Reader at least as much as I use Spotify which is $10/month. So I should honestly be willing to pay at least as much as I pay for spotify.

This thing is the digital archive of my personal short-form reading habits. It’s only going to grow in importance over time. It’s worth paying for when 20 years from now I can easily pull up old articles that made me laugh, share them with grandkids, etc…

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How close is the $1/month plan to coming back?

Thanks for the quick reply, Samuel. Where do you rank form twiddling and lifetime account requests relative to full payment on the “this user’s a jerk” scale? It’d be disingenuous to say that I can’t afford a premium account, but $24 is slightly above the impulse-buy level for students and others without much savings.

I can count the number of jerk users I’ve dealt with on one hand. Everybody else who I disagree with usually has a good point that I’m unable to support. A lower payment tier is one of those things. Ideally I’d be giving away the service, along with a free mailing of ice cream and t-shirts. But if I want to ensure that NewsBlur sticks around, I have to charge what people are willing to pay.

I guess what I’m saying, Sam, is that when I created my “free” NewsBlur account, the pricing started at $12, and that’s been anchored in my mind as a justifiable amount that I would be willing to pay once the service matured. Your comments on Twitter suggest that you are okay exchanging karma for free premium accounts, but for some reason not for discounted ones. I’d subscribe to the $12 account in a heartbeat to support all the great efforts you’ve made to improve the service in the last six months, but now that option has disappeared. I’d love an alternative way to support you in this ballpark - that is why I asked if you consider it legitimate to twiddle with the payment form - or to send you a reddit-style postcard, or buy your t-shirt, or do something else that falls in a middle ground between begging and paying the full rate.

Just email me and I’d be happy to offer you a free premium account.

Seriously, are you kidding?

I don’t work for newsblur. I’m just a google reader refugee like so many others. But premium accounts are dirt cheap (what was it, $24 for 2 years? that’s a dollar a month. way too low).

When I think about the back end required to keep this place going I assume prices *must* go up. Some of the stuff they’re probably dealing with:

  1. keep a potentially unbounded number of articles (nothing stopping you from adding lots of feeds) pulled from web

  2. associate them with your account

  3. update regularly throughout the day

  4. store for x days (14 I think)

  5. purge in a timely enough fashion to keep the whole thing from crashing

  6. synchronized across web and mobile

Complexity-wise it strikes me at least on-par with email. I’d pay at least as much for email as I do for other subscriptions (e.g., nytimes, scientific American, etc…). In compute and storage costs along I have no idea how they break even charging less than 5/month.

Hell, I’d gladly pay 24$ for Shiloh’s autograph!

That should express how much value NewsBlur brings to me, a poor student, for 24$ p.a. Other people smoke cigarettes by the ton. I, for one, am stunned that excellent services like NewsBlur and Pinboard can sustain their complex infrastructure with modest annual fees. And I rely on them several times an hour! (Sorry for being somewhat off-topic.)

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I just want to be sure that your business model is sustainable and that we won’t get dumped to the curb again. As others have said, $24/year is a pittance for the amount I use it and I would gladly support a tiered pricing model. I don’t know if it would be feasible, but for $5-$10 a month I would like to see super-premium accounts that could get fetches on all of their feeds at least twice an hour. That would probably break NB, though, so never mind.

I was worried when the GR apocalypse happened that I would never be as happy as I had been with Google. Now I wonder how I managed to stick with them all these years. This was the impetus need to de-Google my life.

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I wrote this in response to a journalist’s inquiry earlier this morning.

“I’m busy launching a whole slew of features that I’ve been planning since day 1, four years ago. As you may know, of all the current major RSS players, NewsBlur is one of the oldest, dating to June 2009. I’m looking at the http://alternativeto.net/software/goo… list to come to that conclusion. Having lasted through a premium user drought for nearly four years, the numbers now look encouraging enough to think that I’ll last another five years with no problem. Beyond that timeframe, I hope they have a fast internet hookup for the colonies on Mars.”

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Lol! Wouldn’t be surprised at all if half the colonists had newsblur accounts! Best way to separate the wheat from the chaff and keep the quality news stream flowing.

Sam, since some people think that $12 is a better (more attractive price point) why not offer a 6 months for $12?

That way people can pay the $24 is smaller payments.

If someone wants to trial the premium account then $12 is a cheap solution. If people have tight budgets and a whole $24 up front is an issue, again they can opt for 6 month option.

I have no issue with $24 for a year. And I don’t like the idea of free accounts, they mean ads or selling data on you. Feedly is not free, they promote product sales with amazon through free accounts, and decent support requires a plus account. ANd when the ToS change to sell your data what can you do… nowt.

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I was on the fence about upgrading to Premium. I promise you, I really was. Then you reduced my feed list from 10 to 5, as if to say to me, “Let me make this free service a lot less useful, then you’ll really see what a value the premium service is.”

It didn’t work. I’m going to Feedly. I wish you hadn’t done that.

I love all these people complaining about $2/month. I’d love to see your phone, internet and cable bills. They must be WAY less than mine for you to care about $2. Running the NB servers is not cheap. It can either be financed by subscriptions, ads, or data mining. I’d choose subscriptions over those other options any day of the week. If $0.06 per day is too expensive for you for a premium service then I don’t know how you can afford to own a computer. Remember, NB is not a free service. It is a paid service with a free trial period,

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I’m very happy with NewsBlur and I think the fee is totally reasonable. I’ve been using it since migrating off my beloved Feeddemon two months ago, and it’s been a great replacement.

I want this service to thrive and not starve and I sure as heck don’t want to be forced to move to some less than adequate product.

And, frankly, NewsBlur is better designed than Google Reader and some of the other services out there.

The server response, load times, etc., have been very good. That takes good backend equipment and generous bandwidth. It also takes money.

Feedly is not 100% free, enjoy the ads/promoted products

I will enjoy it more than reading 5 articles at a time. Thank you.

Definitely agree with those who feel that Newsblur is well worth $2 a month, and well worth supporting in general. I’m not rolling in money myself, but 6 cents a day is a ridiculously small price to pay for being spared Feedly and its ads. I respect my eyeballs way too much for that.

And while I also greatly appreciate Samuel’s good heart in offering free subscriptions to folks … I hope he doesn’t reward TOO many complainers that way! It kind of devalues those of us who are proud to support the service. :slight_smile:

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Wow, didn’t expect to start a storm of comments on this thread! I absolutely don’t want to take advantage of Samuel and ask for a free account. Mostly I just regret not upgrading sooner, when the $12 plan was available - this is the price that was posted when I signed up, so it’s anchored in my mind as a price that was once fair (maybe a solution would be to offer this plan to accounts created before the Reader announcement, to reward early supporters/leaches?). As NewsBlur grows, my intuition is to expect scale to lower cost-per-user, not increase it. It’s absolutely true that I have many much greater expenses, but at the same time, the incremental value of NewsBlur over Feedly or a desktop app feels about the same as a premium iOS app - maybe $10 or $15, but not too much more. I also have a pretty high aversion towards subscription plans - I’d put $50 down for a lifetime plan much sooner than commit to $24 every year. But of course you’re all right: Samuel is providing a great service and deserves to make a solid living at it.