When the paid version of the very fine Feedly RSS aggregation service, Feedly Pro, was announced at the beginning of this month, the only option available was the Life Membership, at a fairly affordable $99.00.
Today, though, we just noticed that Feedly Pro’s monthly and annual subscriptions are available for purchase, at $5.00 and $45.00, respectively.
What do you get for your five or forty-five dollars? Well, you’ll be able to search your RSS articles from within Feedly itself, save articles to Evernote or Pocket with one click, and you’ll get shunted to the front of the support line if you ever need it.
The article searching alone is worth the $5 per month to me, and $45 per year is a fair price, not to mention the hundred dollar lifetime membership. As Google found out, monetizing your RSS aggregation service is hard to do, and this seems like a small price to pay for the folks at Feedly picking up the mantle and running with it, keeping RSS as a service, rather than as a standalone app. It will be interesting to find out how well Feedly does with this way of doing business, as many folks seem to like free over not free.
The Feedly Pro site has a few frequently asked questions too, saying that the money will go to scaling up the infrastructure and developing new features for the Feedly future. The pro features will also show up in apps that use Feedly as an RSS sync service, via an API that Feedly will take allow other app makers to use.
Source: Feedly
