FeedDemon 4.0, the desktop RSS reader becomes “Freemium”

It has just released the new version of FeedDemon, one of the most popular RSS readers, and offers some time synchronization with Google Reader. However, the main novelty in this latest version adds is a new feature, but a change in its business model.

Until now deployed FeedDemon ad free version, allowing us to pay $ 9.95 to remove these ads and use FeedDemon Ad-free mode. However, even using the free version we had access to all functions and features of the application.

In contrast, FeedDemon now has two versions with different features: the Lite version, which is free and has less features (and still advertising), and Pro which costs $ 19.95 and has full functionality. That is what is known as a “model Freemium” offer the public a limited free version, so incentives to pay for the full version (the same way in which it operates Spotify).

Among the unique features of the Pro version there are some that were previously available in the free edition, as Prefetching (download the feeds to review when we are offline), or some visual themes to display feeds like a newspaper. But there are also new features such as power feeds to subscribe to password protected, something that even Google Reader is capable of, or the ability to create filters to automatically mark as read posts that contain certain words in the title, or content.

Something that benefits both the Lite version and the Pro is the dramatically improved performance. By using SQLite 3.7 to the program now loads almost instantly, and there is rarely crashes (unlike what happened in the previous version).

Unfortunately, it is possible to request a 30-day Trial Version Pro That would be very useful to discriminate whether the functions “premium” or not worth the $ 19.95 it costs more advanced version.