A bunch of companies are also doing or attempting to do AI and automated trial finding for clinical trials, and that's not working either: https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-.... Fortunately, the stakes are low, since patients who don't find the right clinical trial for cancers will only die.

But have the existing approaches really missed a low hanging solution, even if it’s partial and maybe impossible to monetize?

Their free plan is likely enough for most people. I know for me none of those features matter.

Especially since I just never log into Feedly themselves. I just use the Reeder app as my frontend and have gone a couple years without logging in. I also just don't change my actual feeds much.

Imagine that in 2024 I tried to sell you a web browser. One that maybe has a slightly cleaner UI or some fancy plugin system but ultimately is just a plain old browser. Maybe some very small percentage of people would pay for it, but most are entirely happy with the free and FOSS choices available since the core features of a browser are standard.

RSS by all means should be similar: just like ping, cat, sh, browsers, email clients, video players, etc. the core features are well defined and an open source project should be the default choice. If you want something fancy or proprietary then sure you should be free to pay for it. But I can’t imagine wanting to build a company that pays salaries around any of this.

There are situations where a person or a team of 2-3 can make a lifestyle business out of selling something that I have seen referred to as “legacy software” (this doesn’t mean old, but rather fundamental and “boring”, aka the Linux kernel). But Feedly competes with its own free product and cannot see the forest for the trees.

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"

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 business model.

Edit:

Also I really think we should re-examine "open source should be the default" when the vast majority of open source projects are not at the polish of something like Chromium.

Most average (non technical) consumers are not really going to accept what a lot of open source's experience is. See gimp and open office compared to Photoshop and Microsoft Office.