I agree. It's a surreal combination of front-end polish (I'm sort of amazed) and difficult multi-step DIY installation(wtf?). I'd buy a desktop version or subscribe to a hosted version right now, but I don't want to deal with all that crap if I'm paying someone for an application. (If it's open source like Wordpress or something, fine. I'll deal with settign up my own cron jobs and creating databases.)

I hope it does well though, so that it will be worth his time to develop a desktop platform or something I can just purchase from the Apple App Store. (Hopefully both.)

I feel kind of torn on this issue (and Fever in general). I was hoping this was going to be a hosted solution ($30/year) but the idea of hosting it myself also seems kind of cool. I'm just worried that my MediaTemple grid account won't be snappy enough. Does anyone have any thoughts on that? I know people had problems with Mint slowing their servers down. I'll still probably try this out though!

I was thinking long and hard about doing something similar to Fever this year (with the main feature being the granular updates I've mentioned below) but w/ Reader being absolutely free I really didn't think $5/month or $30/year had much of a chance. Plus, hosting all those feeds w/ a one-man shop would've really been a bear.

I think Shaun's $30/one-time cost + you deal with your own feeds is a really smart approach. Wish I'd have thought of it.

Shaun marketed Mint that way (same price point if I remember). It probably worked well enough for him to continue with that model.

I'm sure he also enjoys sleeping without having to worry about server downtime :-)