It’s been a terrific journey of 5 years in public service for our free to use FeedManager since its inception back in February 2005. Thanks to each one of you who used it, for your continued patronage and to make it such a success!
Over the years we have received numerous love mails from many of you who used FeedManager and a lot of you had many great things to suggest. Thanks again! Many of you have also expressed in your emails how important a few things, like quicker responses to your support emails, 99% uptime guarantee, faster feed-serving and page-load times etc. were to you, and we did our best to give you for free what was possible of us with all the time, real money, energy and effort we could spare.
Things have been scaling at a great speed at the technical side as well with ever increasing adoption of our services, growing number of feeds created, increasing number of subscriptions to the users’ feeds etc. (not to forget RSS feed serving itself is a highly resource intensive job) demanding more and more Processing Power, Bandwidth, Memory and other resources. Nevertheless, we have always tried our best to keep pace with all this and to provide a smooth service, with frequent hardware and software upgrades, intensive optimizations etc. This obviously has cost us real money but we still kept the service free of charge all this while!
However, in some serious discussions during the past few weeks, we at RapidFeeds have analysed a great deal of data including the demand vs. our capacity to supply, user feature-request trends, support / inquiry email volumes vs. response time history, feed uptime value to our users and its impact on their businesses, traffic vs. resources required for faster feed-serving and page-load time, and much more, and came to a conclusion that we can create a win win situation for both our users and RapidFeeds by adopting the ‘Freemium’ model going forward.
This ‘Freemium’ model will make available our services in form of different packages (free and paid) that will put us in a better position to cater to the needs of our users based on their demand. In other words, using this model our users will be able to reserve for themselves, for a very little price, a degree of resources in all aspects based on their requirements and enjoy a greater level of service.
On the other hand, the money that flows in will allow us to employ more resources to further improve and scale our services, guarantee 99% uptime, decrease the TAT (Turn Around Time) for support requests, provide dedicated support to the users who need it, upgrade hardware and software from time to time to ensure uninterupted service, develop new features and much much more!
We hope this sounds as exciting to you as it does to us! We’ll post here further details in this regard shortly, including the package details and prices. So watch this space and stay tuned!
Special Note: We would like to thank each one of you who took the survey we sent out recently. Your responses have been of great help and one of the main factors in deciding the future of RapidFeeds. Thanks again!