Earlier this month, Google Reader replacement Feedly began offering a paid version of its service, but only in limited quantities. Barely a day after the paid tier became available, the company sold out of the introductory 5,000 Pro accounts it had initially offered. Today, the startup is making Feedly Pro generally available to anyone interested, as previously promised.
The premium tier offers in-demand features like search, one-click Evernote and Pocket integration, plus premium customer support, and the company says that more Pro features will be added regularly in the future.
Search has been one of the features serious RSS subscribers have felt was worth paying for, as it’s something that a majority of the feed-reading apps today still neglect to include or haven’t yet built. (Feedspot being one of the more prominent exceptions currently. Competitor Digg Reader has also said that search would eventually be considered part of its forthcoming premium product, too.)
That being said, our initial experiences with search have found the integration still in need of having some of its kinks worked out. Sometimes, search would fail to produce results we knew were there (and found via Googling), other times it was just too slow to be effective. Certainly, its capabilities will vary depending on the size of your own database of feeds – or, as they say, your mileage may vary. It’s still far more convenient to have the option, buggy as it may be, than not.
When Feedly first introduced its Pro tier in August, it found traction in countries all over the world, including not just the U.S., but also Brazil, France, Spain, Germany, the U.K., and parts of Asia. However, the $99 lifetime account being offered at that time will no longer be an option going forward. As the company explained then, the lifetime account was meant to be a one-time reward for Feedly’s early adopters. Today’s launch of Pro sees instead the previous price points of $5 per month or $45 per year as the only two plans now offered.
The launch of premium pricing should help to quell some people’s fears that Feedly was not building a sustainable business. The company, which has been bootstrapping until now, hasn’t discounted the idea of raising funding eventually, but has not yet done so, co-founders Edwin Khodabakchian and Cyril Moutran recently told us. But at least now with Feedly Pro, the startup will have some revenues.
Feedly has grown to over 13 million users since Google Reader’s shutdown, and has 30 API partners live on its Feedly Cloud platform, which is what allows other news-reading services to utilize Feedly’s backend for their own purposes. And more API partners are on the way, we hear.
The option to purchase a Feedly Pro subscription is live now here.