I'm not familiar with your reader, so I don't want anyone to take this as a comment on what you've made — but I know that the first two are both monetized, though they don't tell what you'll have to pay up-front. A third-party for-profit business with sketchy monetization practices doesn't seem like a better replacement for RSS integrated in Firefox.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment, but I wouldn't consider having an optional paid version of your free product to be sketchy practice? I use feedly and I've never paid a penny. Sure, they've tried to upsell me a handful of times but that's hardly insidious. I mean I'm literally already using their product, what's wrong with offering me a pro account?
does that matter? surely that's just poor marketing on their part. knowing a free service also had a paid option wouldn't put me off. in fact, it would be more likely to encourage me to use it, because if they're making money from pro users then 1) they're more likely to still be in business in five years time and 2) they're less likely to resort to advertising or selling my data.
>A third-party for-profit business with sketchy monetization
What is exactly is sketchy? What is bad about a for-profit business?
>though they don't tell what you'll have to pay up-front
Where did you get that? You're registering for a free account. If you want to upgrade, you select a plan. All information of the features you would unlock are available upfront.
For one, it's not as accessible to all of Mozilla's users. Remember, their goal is to help the poor and the young as well as SV programmers.
Besides that, not necessarily anything — there are lots of great businesses out there — but it creates a greater possibility of mismatched incentives than something like Mozilla. My highest goal in a feed reader is to be able to keep up to date with feeds hassle-free. A for-profit business's highest goal is to make money. The best way for them to achieve their goal might be helping me achieve my goal as efficiently as possible, or it might not.
> Where did you get that? You're registering for a free account. If you want to upgrade, you select a plan. All information of the features you would unlock are available upfront.
Can you find for me the part on Feedly's front page where it tells you what all the limitations on a free account are, which are relieved by upgrading to a pro account? I can't find any place where it even lets you know there's more than one kind of account. For a couple of specific examples:
- It doesn't mention that there's a limit on subscriptions on a free account.
- Many of the integrations mentioned on the front page don't appear to be enabled for a free account (e.g. OneNote, EverNote, Slack).
>For one, it's not as accessible to all of Mozilla's users. Remember, their goal is to help the poor and the young as well as SV programmers.
What nonsense is this? How is a free account inaccessible, and how are Mozilla's(??) users specifically affected?
>(...) there are lots of great businesses out there — but it creates a greater possibility of mismatched incentives than something like Mozilla. (...) The best way for them to achieve their goal might be helping me achieve my goal as efficiently as possible, or it might not.
So, you don't have an argument against them. Just a bunch of maybes.
...
I don't like Feedly, so be my guest if you want to hate it. However, both services list all the features of every plan once you're in. A lot of per account or freemium services do that, it's nothing new.
Maybe I didn't do a good job getting this across, but I don't care that much about losing these specific Firefox features.
I really want new users to be able to discover features like RSS/Atom feeds. Live bookmarks can definitely go to the grave in my mind, but I hope Mozilla will focus in the future on web features that help advocate the federated web.
The real means to fix that is to make the popular browsers redirect rss feeds to readers. You should be able to pick one, but if you don't set a reader it should default to something reasonable like feedly. The main barrier to adoption RSS has always faced is that for most people who don't know what it is the links are dead and do nothing except sometimes offering an arcane and unhelpful prompt for a program to open it with.
