That's an overreaching interpretation of parent's post. Besides, the "rights" issue is a red herring. Making an analogy - and yes, I know it's not accurate, it's an analogy -, people don't have a the "right" to a free car, but if I am going to offer free cars, surely we can agree they should have breaks.
The idea that because it's free it's above all criticism is simply unreasonable.
Personally, I don't think requiring payment for SSL is wrong, though.
> The idea that because it's free it's above all criticism is simply unreasonable.
Solution: shut down the free version. Addressing complaints from free users who demand things captures absolutely zero value when you're a struggling startup with too much else to do and limited resources still trying to make a viable business. Freemium doesn't work unless you're swimming in VC money and only care about user growth, not MRR growth.
Shut down the free service and no one will get hooked to your product, and choose a another free service to start with, and maybe even pay for it later.
Providing both free and payed tier is the way to go, especially in the commodity market segment like RSS readers, unless you are in a niche without too much competition.
I disagree. RSS readers have a significant long tail expense per user. I worked at Bloglines. Pretty much every one of those free users have extra little RSS feeds that nobody else subscribes to that you have to crawl, handle invalid rss/xml for, update and keep unread status on. At scale, that is the most expensive part of operating an RSS reader, and it's not worth it.
I agree with your point that keeping RSS user is not free. But, from the users perspective, RSS readers are a commodity. You can't sell them subscription unless you provide them a free ride to actually check and hook up to your service. The only reason that OP is successful is having a business model working is that he already has a large userbase which was acquired largely because it was free.
Any site viewed over plain HTTP is susceptible to content injection by ISPs, public wifi providers, employers, etc, basically anyone between you and the server. At best it's annoying, at worst it's a security hazard.
And as someone else mentioned, the session cookie is still transmitted in plaintext, which effectively compromises your Feedly account.
Not to be too glib about it, but for God's sake, who cares? It's my Feedly account. It holds my read/unread status for my daily newsfeeds. What's the big hacker target here? Spoofing that I've already read Hacker News today? Subscribing me to feeds I don't want? I encourage Feedly not to waste time securing that on my behalf.
For the functionality Feedly provides, plain HTTP is a reasonable amount of security. I also, up until fairly recently, received news via a bundle of paper left on my doorstep. Shocking, I know.
As a user, I know that a lot of "just $5 a month" services add up quite quickly, especially if they're not tools you use every day or as part of a workflow.
Probably what annoys me most about this is that HTTPS was already there (I've been using it for a good month or two). This would imply that the costs were already spent, the infrastructure was in place and it was working just fine.
Why exactly is that? By far most people do not care at all that other people are (theoretically) able to see what they are reading. I certainly don’t at all.
I do not think HTTPS is in any way a required feature for a feedreader. It’s pretty perfect as a premium feature.
Personally, think we should encourage an ecosystem where https is a given, rather than feature. I would prefer that companies saw this as part-and-parcel with being a responsible service provider.
FWIW, I'm a big fan of Feedly, and have upgraded to Pro.
There are plenty of reasons to prefer secure browsing by default. Perhaps I subscribe to feeds that would be flagged as "suspect" by programs like PRISM[1] and XKeyscore[2], and would like to make the NSA work at least a little bit to find that out.
And you can pay for that feature. I have no real stake in the game here, but I'm failing to see why that is a must-have feature for every user of the service.
Feasibly, the lack of HTTPS for a subset of users could be used as an attack vector against Feedly, which could surface information about me that I do not want revealed even if I were a Pro user using HTTPS.
Since Google Reader went down, I've found I waste less time. I used to use Reeder as my front-end, but they've been slow to update their desktop app. I realize I'm "missing" things I used to keep up to date on, but the net gain is a lot more time I used to spend consuming what I suppose was superfluous content. For me - it's been kind of a nice change.
I had the same experience when I stopped using Opera and didn't have the RSS reader anymore. I do miss reading webcomics regularly, but the productivity gain is nice.
Google Search? I don't recall the last time I had to send Google an email because their search wasn't working for me. Over the top example, but an example nonetheless.
That doesn't mean people are willing to pay for faster support or even need it. Feedly offers a pro account but obviously decided against crippling the free account. I'm very happy about that. If people are willing to pay they get priority support as an additional value. And as bonus: if the support queue is short once it is implemented in the support software/workflow this feature costs feedly nothing.
That's great and all, but my RSS Service has SSL by default, no support queue, and is only $2/month or $16/year. Everyone is a user, and everyone is treated the same. No ads, ever.
Fantastic. Making the users the customers is something I heartily approve of. It aligns the interests of the service providers with the interests of the users, and means they have to compete on service, rather than spending their time finding ways to make people click on ads.
Honest question: why do people pay for "pro" RSS services? There are enough out there that I don't feel I would ever need to - I was using oldreader until they shut it down to everyone and now use digg reader - is there specific functionality I'm missing out on by not using these premium services? There's always the whole adage of if it's free then you could lose it, but with the amount of readers out there it seems like I could hop to and from services.
Because it would be nice to not have to constantly hop to and from services as they die from lack of resources?
Because it would be nice to not have to periodically have to re-learn everything as the app you're familiar with dies and you have to switch to an unfamiliar one?
Well, my reflex response is yes. Transport security seems like an odd thing to call a feature for a feed reader. Of course it's possible that it's a brutal cost multiplier for them - I'd be interested to know.
I would be put off paying $99 for a lifetime account. These should be available up to 5,000, but users should be able to still opt for the $5 or $45 options.
Update: they tweeted "HTTPS is currently a pro only feature. Will extend it to everyone when we have a way to fund it." (see https://twitter.com/feedly/status/364292745487065088)