As a customer of theirs for probably around two years, I could not disagree more.
As far as online services go, Feedbin is absolute perfection.
They offer a clearly defined service.
I give them money and they provide said service. It is rock-solid.
One invoice email every month, and _absolutely nothing else_.
No changes. No feature creep. No upselling. No customer satisfaction surveys. Zero bullshit, zero annoyances. None. Zip. Zilch.
Why would I want to pay monthly for a feed reader? What's the added value? Why feedbin? I was building something similar for newsletters with newsletterify.com. The value proposition was simple: clean inbox, help with information overload. I also wanted to add summaries and recommendations. Help me out with all the information overload. It would've been similarly priced. And I probably would've thrown in an RSS reader later. (I want to continue the project later this year, but now I'm drowned)
I don't have much to add to the discussion about feed readers, but I think you're seeing a good lesson on the value of actually shipping. It is harder than it seems.
Their value, for now, is that they managed to push it through and actually deliver a solid product (apparently, from what the commenter said), with a sensible form of self-sustaining, so users can rely on it still existing in 3 years time. That's also itself part of the value proposition, for lots of users.
I see that! But I also shipped 2markdown.com and I have a main gig where I also ship. I shipped newsletterify as well, it's up and running but didn't attract any users at all. So I'll do a second run later this year, with a rewrite and a different pricing model (adding a free tier).
Woah you have a good amount of products going on, no wonder you're swamped. Congrats on all those, and wish you good luck with them and future launches!
I used to pay for it but it there was slow response to bugs and no appetite for new features. You might call it feature creep, but there were feeds I wanted to read that it couldn't render, and OSS that could.
