I don't understand why they don't want to charge for it. It will slow down signups and give them funding to scale up. They could also use invite-style signups like LiveJournal did back in the day.
I didn't sign up for the old reader because having to pay for it was at the top of my requirements, on the basis that people are more likely to keep things going if you're paying for them. Not always true I know, but it does hold some weight.
The answer is right in the article: they just simply don't want to. They don't want to be entrepreneurs. They don't want to build a company and hire people and run a service that has hundreds of thousands or millions of users.
You may disagree with that, but, well... that's their call to make, not yours.
>on the basis that people are more likely to keep things going if you're paying for them.
That could also make people feel obligated to keep things running when they really don't want to. Imagine the feeling of still needing to shut down a service people have paid for because it was still not making enough money to be worth it. Now you have paid customers you have an actual obligation to. I can imagine that would be very stressful.
> shut down a service people have paid for because it was still not making enough money to be worth it.
but why would it not be worth the money paid for? you can't just charge some token market rate, hoping for scale to profit - you _ought_ to charge the amount it costs plus profit to run it, and so even if you had 1 user, it would be profitable.
Now, whether this is something the owners want to maintain is a different question vs can't charge enough to be worth it.
>so even if you had 1 user, it would be profitable.
That isn't really the case, though. There is a minimum amount of infrastructure you need. One paying customer is not going to cover that. And a project that pays for itself with a little profit is still not always worth it if you are killing yourself to maintain it, have another job, etc.
I kicked the tires after the Google Reader announcement, but it was always apparent that the team wasn't able to keep up with the rush of new users. I think the best outcome here would be a sale to a more dedicated party, but regardless of that, I can see why they would want to take this route.
They're working on a free service for love. They deserve to do that on their own terms.
Software and technoloy should be a joy and a light, not a curse.
For those who would like to start the usual “VC, funding, mentor” or “charge for the damn thing” mantras — please, spare it. We’re not in the Valley where it might be super-easy, and, after all, not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. We just love making a good RSS reader.
I hate this false belief that "good RSS reader" and "RSS reader that you have to pay for" are somehow diametrically opposed to one another.
Best of luck to the team. I hope everything works out.
For me, Google shutting down Reader was a huge wake-up call that I should be paying for the things that I depend on as much as I did GReader.
I signed up & paid for both pinboard and newsblur within a week of the announcement, and purposely avoided theoldreader and others that didn't have any sort of sustainable business model (although there were/are plenty of other solid projects out there).
Welp. I guess I'm in no place to complain, but I will anyway.
My college friends and I were very active users of The Actual Old Reader. We shared a lot of content internally and commented profusely. When Google made the switch to force everyone onto Google+, our sharing didn't continue but we still used GReader.
When Google pulled the plug on Reader and we all needed a new place to go, we discussed a lot internally on which we would all collectively used. We settled on the Old Reader because of its sharing / commenting features (if there are others with these features, let me know!). This was just a few weeks ago.
So we didn't pay money, but we paid a lot in time and commitment. This is frustrating.
I believe it also states, in more words, "but not enough to continue offering them our time and service, sorry!" so I don't believe complaining would do anything. I'm sure they are already aware people will be upset.
I really like theoldreader because it was a zero-overhead switch from Google Reader (and I liked things about Google Reader that were changed in other alternatives that I briefly looked at).
However, I switched to bazqux.com a few weeks ago. It has all the same Reader features I love, but also shows comments, which is a great feature addition. Oh, and it feels lightning fast.
They charge $9/year and will probably never get overloaded since they have the worst site name ever (from a marketing standpoint).
Of all the alternatives I've tried today after The Old Reader's announcement (I've tried about 5 others, and quickly deleted my account from most of them) - this certainly feels like the best reader for me.
It's fast, blazing fast compared to the alternatives. The UI isn't perfect, but the speed certainly makes up for it.
Discovering how to skip all those comments was a bit difficult though, and it's hard to see whether the current item is marked as read or not but other than that, I love it so far.
Off to discovering how can I edit my profile...
I moved onto the digg reader (digg.com/reader) before TOR crashed when they were just really really sluggish. The digg reader is close to as fast as Google Reader was.
Yip, I'm definitely happy with digg/reader... it'll be perfecto once the Android version comes out I reckon. They've definitely kept things fast & simple.
Went with pocketcasts as a replacement for Google Listen - also very happy with that (though sad that Reader and Listen went away of course)
Not having a demo (or a feature list... or even a screenshot) is very frustrating. It wastes my time and their time to have me signup only to find I don't like it 2 minutes later. Mind posting a screenshot?
I pulled a few screen caps from bing for expediency's sake. The UI is very spartan, lots of whitespace, minimal chrome (UI busy-ness is what drove me away from Newsblur), and it's fast. One complaint is the large amount of whitespace when reading the story but it's tolerable. They aren't monetizing yet, unless they are it's via data aggregating (highly likely I guess) but there are no ads. I'd like to hear what the long term plans are.
Another user pointed to bazqux.com which has a similarly clean UI but with the added bonus of pulling in comments which would be a nice time saver. And the are upfront about charging for the product which makes me feel a little better about long term prospects. I'll probably put it through the paces speed wise and see if I want to migrate one last time.
Thanks. I signed up. It has some UI issues but I can live with that. Reader wasn't perfect in the UI either. I think I like Digg Reader better than TOR.
Same here. I liked it (even if a little flawed) but never donated. I think this gives me the motivation to self host something that I know won't go away.
Some of the comments there made me despair and never want to build anything, ever. So much entitlement from people who have no idea what someone else's situation is.
It's easy if you're in the US (or the UK) to just throw up a PayPal integration, set up a Ltd company, and start taking payments into a business bank account.
It's not going to be trivial everywhere in the world. Rules for minimum capital and paperwork can vary from 'trivial' to 'traumatic'. Lots of countries have problems getting payment providers, even PayPal - here's an article from earlier in the year about how they're gearing up for their Russian launch sometime this year: http://www.ewdn.com/2013/05/23/paypal-receives-license-from-...
If this was my pet side project, in the UK, yeah I'd take a couple of days to set up a Ltd company and do a PayPal or Stripe or GoCardless integration, but not everyone has it as easy as we do.
These guys have gone above and beyond for a service that they can't easily turn into a business, so now it's pretty much just heartache and woe, and that's just sad.
For sure. There is no need to go all ragey on them. The system crashed, they got it back up, they got totally overwhelmed and are now taking actions best for their lives. No fault there. Best of luck to them. I've already moved on. ;)
We were avid users of Google Reader, and have strived to remain faithful to its functionality in building kouio, like the Old Reader did. We've also understood that in order for a service like this to operate, it needs to be paid for. Kouio is free at the moment as we want to finish off a few more features before we start charging, but we're probably about a month away from switching to paid accounts.
Some early users noted some performance issues, but those have since been resolved. Please give it another try :-)
I've just imported my OPML file from the Old Reader into Kouio and it looks great! At first glance, you've done a great job with the interface - this could be my new RSS reader. However, I really, really need to be able to search.
Yep, the API powering the UI actually supports it already, we just need to expose it in the UI. We're madly blasting through missing features, so stay tuned :-)
I picked the old reader because it was a no-fuss google reader replacement. Feedly is bloated and was slow to boot. I also didn't want to pay to read my feeds.
I'm now switching to Digg Reader, which is equally simple, and has an android app coming soon (the iOS app is already out).
Never felt comfortable with this service from day one.
By now, I have tested many and have stuck around long with InoReader. However, I must confess that nobody is doing this better than Feedly team under the circumstances. So I give up looking anywhere else for now.
Gave The Old Reader a try but it failed to even properly import my Google Reader feeds -- it stopped at the letter 'H'. Also, did not note any feature it did better than Feedly or any of the other competitors.
Feedly is OK, in some ways a notch up from the stagnant Google Reader, but lack of search is so frustrating and disappointing.
i expected the influx of traffic to cause some (free) services to fail, and so to hedge my bets, i signed up for several that i found as acceptable Google Reader replacements. Hurray for insurance policy!
I didn't sign up for the old reader because having to pay for it was at the top of my requirements, on the basis that people are more likely to keep things going if you're paying for them. Not always true I know, but it does hold some weight.