My recollection when trying to find a Google Reader alternative was that there was no free alternative. Everything at the time that I found had been a premium alternative to Reader before it shut down.
Paying does not guarantee anything. It does not guarantee a more reliable service, it does not guarantee that they will hear you out when they change a feature or the design, ruining it, and it does not guarantee it won't shut down tomorrow. They will refund you, and you will have your money back, but you will have no service, and you will be back in square one.
I mean... sure. Even paid services eventually shut down.
But I have far more confidence in something at least making sense for the company to keep running if it is something I pay for vs something that is just given away for free.
If I am relying on an online service, while paying for it doesn't guarantee it being up it's a safer bet than a free one.
Your mentality of expecting everything to be free is why there are no alternatives, and also why Google Reader shut down. Building and maintaining these services isn't free, so when people don't want to pay for it there's no incentive to actually make or maintain such service.
Right. Even if we want to say that it could take a one time deployment and it can just sit there forever (which, it can't. it needs security updates and similar).
The server itself isn't free. Sure if they are smart if multiple people are subscribed to the same feed it only fetches once, but just the constant fetching would eat up resources. Then storing that data, you retrieving it yourself, etc.
An RSS Reader is really a technical miracle, requiring lots of maintenance and development effort.
I guess a 10€/Month Subscription would be just the minimum for a such an cutting edge product, right?
