Feedly: when offering a premium service is the logical move

If you use RSS feed reader Feedly, you may have noticed an offer today to update to FeedlyPro, its premium option at five dollars a month or 45 dollars a year, along with a 99 dollar one-off payment offer for a lifetime license for the first 5,000 people to apply.

The thinking behind the decision to offer a premium pay product in the case of an RSS feeds reader raises a number of interesting points. Feedly is, no doubt about it, the most successful competitor to emerge since the announcement that Google Reader was being withdrawn shocked a segment with a reasonable number of users characterized by their loyalty. An RSS feeds reader quickly generates something like dependency: you spend a lot of time with it, and you trust it not just to efficiently sift through news, but in many cases to act as a repository, with the capacity to pull up anything you might find interesting.

Feedly, a small start up consisting of around 20 people based in San Francisco, was quick off the block following Google’s announcement on March 13: the next day on its blog was an entry entitled “Transitioning from Google Reader to Feedly”, that not only offered a few tips to help Reader refugees adapt, but also announced increased band width and more servers. Feedly is known for listening to what its users say: time and again we have seen it…