This is a great example of a business built on what should not really be a business

> RSS by all means should be similar: just like ping, cat, sh, I must say that reading an RSS feed is as simple as this: wget "myURL" -O - | python3 -c ' import sys import xml.etree.ElementTree as et tree = et.fromstring(sys.stdin.read()) for el in tree.findall("./channel/item"): print(el.find("title").text)' But the other applications that you mention are not simple applications: > browsers, email clients, video players, etc. the core features are well defined and an open source project should be the default choice. [1] _ Sample URL: " https://www.tomshardware.com/feeds/all "

While I get where you are going with open source project being the default choice, I don't think it fits the example here. Feedly, like Google Reader, for me is nothing but a server. It's the same reason I pay for my email, iCloud, and similar services. I am paying for them to store data, run some service, or similar for me. Even if I went the open source route I would still want a server that is doing the fetching for me. A central place to keep things in sync between multiple devices and to cut down on the data usage when on my phone. That server costs money to run. Either I am running that server myself (and taking on the Maintence of it) or I pay a service like Feedly. While I agree that Feedly's way of monetization is likely wrong when they could have just run the route of $5 a month and that's it. Nothing fancy, it fetches and thats it. That could be a perfectly sustainable busines…

The wild thing is, that’s almost exactly what Netscape was doing back in mid and late 90s. I think the commercial versions (ie the one you bought in a box at Babbage’s or Electronic Boutique), had an HTML editor, and some more integrated file types. I don’t really remember. I never bought it, because the free beta version was enough.