It is a thing, and it makes feedly a bad application. "Not having ads" does not make your RSS reader good, it just makes it "not doing something bad and frankly, plain stupid". Not having trackers or ads is a given, in the same way your coffee maker doesn't come with tracking or ads, and you should go "uh, what? no thanks I'll use something else, this is ridiculous" when you find a coffee maker that does. Selling your coffee maker as "doesn't have tracking or ads!" just tells us your product has nothing else worth talking about.
Hello, thank you for your feedback. Yes, we do show ads in the Free version, there is always Feedly Pro with no ads. Ads in the Free version help us fund new projects and the infrastructure.
That's what paid pro accounts are for. Your product is good enough to merit people giving you money, which lets you develop the features that pro user benefit from, and free users get a taste of, to convince them to switch to a pro account.
Ads as your kickstarter in the absence of a pro account user base? Sure, if you have no other capital to work with, go for it. Still ads even after you have a pro account system in place generating cashflow? Now you're just being bad human beings.
Agreed. This reminds me of those products in the grocery store with "produced locally" on them. If that's the best you can say about something, it must be really bad.