Feedly launches Premium service

Feedly has launched a premium services in the last couple of days. For $5 a month or $45 per year you get access to a limited set of extra features. There was also an introductory offer of $99 for life but they have since sold out.

Since Google Reader has shut down, Feedly have been doing some excellent work to offer a replacement service. They have also allowed 3rd parties to access their servers which has lessened the void that would have been left, considering how many services relied on Google Reader.

Feedly has been active in seeking customer feedback to try improve the service and sometime ago they mentioned that a paid for service would be arriving. At the time I gave my feedback and pointed out that it was hard to see what features could be added that people would pay for. The features that they have come up with so far, with the promise of more being added, are:

1. HTTPS
2. Priority Support
3. One Click saving to Evernote
4. Article search

If I am being honest there is little there that would make me reach into my wallet. Using HTTPS should be a standard at this stage and you could easily argue that search should be included in the free version, but to be fair to Feedly they have to finance the equipment and resources needed to provide the search service. Again priority support is a not a strong selling point. I’ve personally never had to contact their support to begin with and if there was an issue, it isn’t the type of service where you would be panicking if it took them more than a few hours to get back to you.

So at the moment signing up for the paid for service is a good way of supporting Feedly for the work they have done to provide an excellent replacement for Google Reader, but it is offering little else for now.

I think Feedly are going to need to be careful how they market the premium service in the future. At the end of the day it is an RSS aggregator so people can still go to original website to view content. Yes it’s a few more clicks but it’s free! It isn’t a service like Spotify or Netflix that is offering you access to content that isn’t readily available in other places and once people have got used to using a free service it is very hard to change their mindset and then get them to pay for it, even if a massive amount has been spent in the background to provide those free services.

If you are a Feedly user let us know if you’ll be signing up for the premium version.