Feedly Pro accounts launch for everyone

Feedly Pro (teaser 002)

If you were not among the first 5,000 people to sign up for Feedly’s lifetime account, you were left out in the cold. Well, I may be exaggerating because anyone could get a free Feedly account. But if your daily productivity depends depends on RSS and your needs go far beyond a basic set of features, passing on that once in a lifetime opportunity, in hindsight, was a bummer.

The Feedly team has always maintained they’re building their web app for scale and today they announced that Feedly Pro accounts are now available to anyone interested…

A more powerful Feedly Pro costs five bucks per month, or $45 per year, which gets you RSS search, Evernote and Pocket integration and premium customer support, with more Pro features to be added regularly in the future.

“The goal is to offer our most passionate users more productivity and make feedly sustainable in the long run,” said the startup in a blog post.

Building web apps for scale takes time and lots of money, but the 5,000 people who bought a $99 Pro lifetime subscription provided much-needed funding for infrastructure expansion and customer support staff.

Note that pro features are work in progress so expect the unexpected.

TechCrunch weighs in on Feedly Pro RSS search:

Our initial experiences with search have found the integration still in need of having some its kinks worked out. Sometimes, search would fail to produce results we knew were there (and found via Googling), other times it was just too slow to be effective.

Certainly, its capabilities will vary depending on the size of your own database of feeds – or, as they say, your mileage may vary. It’s still far more convenient to have the option, buggy it may be, than not.

Unfortunately, the $99 lifetime account that Feedly offered was a one-time reward for early adopters so it will no longer be an option going forward.

“We also listened to your feedback and added one-click Pocket integration and brought HTTPS support to feedly standard,” the team wrote.

You can buy a Feedly Pro subscription here.

By last count, Feedly had 30 API partners signed up for the Feedly Cloud platform.

What’s your favorite RSS app now that Google Reader has been shut down?