In my opinion, when you start out with a project plan you decide how the project is going to benefit others and how it’s going to benefit yourself. Then in marketing the product you try to convince others that it will benefit them in a way that it worth what they would pay for it.

I guess I feel I have a need for this product in one shape or another, but not a need to pay.

And moreover I think that’s what is involved with

I’d never pay for any online service, all online services should be free.

(Not that I am the one that initially said that statement.)

Time is valuable. Syndication feeds save time.
I used to have a large links page that I would go through and click on each for updates about 3-5x each day. This process took me between 10 minutes and an hour each time I went through. Many of the…

I’ve had some issues with Newgator, and if FL can take them away, then £3 p/m is not a bad deal, as well as being able to use on any machine anywhere.

Keep at it!!

A friend of mine, Alex King and I recently had lunch. We got into a discussion about paying for online services. He recently started a new online service called Feed Lounge

I’m by no means ‘loose’ with my money, but I wouldn’t think twice about signing up, assuming the service was remotely useful & could replace my current reader.

SERIOUSLY people.. $5! You’re hard pressed to even find a LUNCH that cheap nowadays. (And you only need to pay THIS fee once a month!)

Consider, for a moment, Flickr and ImageShack. They’re both in roughly the same space—free Web hosting of photos—but Flickr is so much better than ImageShack that many folks supported it early on in its life. [It was successful to the point that Yahoo! even bought 'em out, y'know?]

The end result of all of this is that Alex and Scott want to fill a niche: a shared services system for consuming syndication feeds. The end value isn’t going to come from just a good user experience, although that alone is worth paying for. It’s going to come from having a good user experience, not ever having to worry much about your feed reader or maintain it—which I’ve had to do in the past—and in the community knowledge base that FL hopes to build.

I understand that some people look at it as a pure dollars-and-cents proposition, and I can respect that, honestly. But in making dollars-and-cents your highest-priority “feature”, you will sacrifice other features along the way. For me, I don’t want to sacrifice that.

I completely agree that if the service can’t sustain itself we’ll need to rethink the model. I believe it can sustain itself, I’m just trying to share what is going on behind the curtain.

UPDATE: One more note – if you pay $5/month and use the service 4 times a day, that comes out to ~$.04 per usage. For some, this will be worth it – others (IMO, more casual users) will not have that level of usage and won’t see value in the paid version. Both views are right.