[aflag]

The author acknowledged that though. He seemed to even had considered buying it, but thought it was not worth it. He eventually settled on something simple and free. It doesn't surprise me that running a simple RSS feed tool is not profitable.

[motoxpro]

That's 100% reasonable. What's not reasonable is spending time to write a blog post in a tone that makes it seem like the product "is bad". The may not like it but the author wasn't a customer. It's the classic "I would buy it/pay for it if it only had XYZ or did/didn't do ABC." When in reality they were never going to pay for it, they just wanted something simple and free, which is 100% fine.

[simonw]

There is very little simple about running an RSS aggregator, especially at scale.

[aflag]

The user doesn't really care about the scale, though. There are chrome plugins, local apps, etc. With dropbox and other similar tools, you can sync across devices and keep configuration stored in the cloud without much hassle.

I'm not saying that what feedly was doing was trivial. I'm sure it was expensive and required many developers, designers, etc. However, that doesn't mean that all the effort is necessarily important for the end user.

[wahnfrieden]

I run one at scale, it doesn’t need to be done in a complicated way

[wahnfrieden]

What I’m saying is by running so many heavy services in the backend, relying on a series of API integrations to provide service and taking custody of swaths of sometimes sensitive user data, they make their own problems