RapidFeeds Blog

Update: Free (Default) Package revised. Included iTunes, Scheduling and Password Protection! Learn more

As we mentioned in our earlier post, in order to equip ourselves to provide you an improved overall service, we have decided to follow the Freemium model for FeedManager going forward.

What this means to all the users signing up for FeedManager starting today is that the Freemium model will be immediately effective for them, and they’ll have to subscribe to a package to start using FeedManager.

But if you are an existing FeedManager user as of today, you can continue to use the FeedManager without any difference in service until July 1, 2010.  However, with effect from July 1, 2010 the unlimited use of FeedManager will no longer be available to you for free of charge.  Rather, it will be available via 4 different levels of free and paid packages as described below:

Update:

To keep the service free of any interruptions beginning July 1, 2010, we have put in place for you a system, using which you can subscribe in advance to the package that suits your needs best starting right now!  However, you will start getting billed for your package only from July 1, 2010 and not before that.  Moreover, you can still continue to use the unlimited version of FeedManager without any difference in service until July 1, 2010 on which date your account will be automatically converted to the package you opted for.

We highly recommend you to subscribe to the package that suits your needs best as early as possible to avoid any interruptions in service when the Freemium model would take effect on July 1, 2010.  Please follow the below give instructions to subscribe:

1. Login to your RapidFeeds account
2. Go to the Billing tab
3. Select your package and billing cycle
4. Subscribe via PayPal
5. You are done!

Important:  Please not that the FeedManager accounts of all the users who did not susbscibe to a package as of July 1, 2010 will be automatically converted to the “FeedManager Free” package.  This would mean that all the feeds in your account, except the oldest one will be automatically disabled and you’ll not be able to use them or execute any functions like edit, add item, update etc. on them.  Also, all the advanced features which are not part of the “FeedManager Free” package will be automatically disabled for your active feed as well.  You’ll however have an option to go back and upgrade your account to any of the paid packages and your feeds and the advanced features will be restored accordingly.

Please feel free to write to us at support@rapidfeeds.com if you have any questions in this regard and we shall get back to you as soon as possible.

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!

You might see a sudden increase in your feed traffic in the next few days.  Please be happy that there is nothing wrong with our stats system and all that traffic is genuine.  You might see this sudden plunge in subscriptions and traffic to your feeds as we are broadening the coverage of User Agents.  This is a routine at the backend to include in our stats system the new User Agents from time to time as they become more popular to track subscriptions and hits from them.   However, this time around there are more than a few User Agents that we are adding to our database and this might make your graphs surge a little if your users are using these agents.  Also, for the few users for whom the Google Reader subscriptions were not showing up, the good news is that this is now fixed and you should be able to see the subscriptions and hits coming from the Google Reader to your feeds.

Cheers

In our quest to serve you better and better, we have totally revamped the Help Center and made it much more user friendly and useful.  This update was pushed a few weeks ago and was being tested so some of the users might have already noticed the change!  Now you can find all the help you need with RapidFeeds documented in this space here: http://www.rapidfeeds.com/docs/ – bookmark it now!

We tried to cover most of the topics in these documents, but if you feel something is missing, please feel free to request the inclusion by sending an email to suggestions@rapidfeeds.com.  We’ll be adding and updating the documents to this space as and when required.

Cheers!

We are very glad with the successful launch of MySite Pro and its great response!  We don’t have enough words to express our thankfulness to all those who have supported RapidFeeds with their donations, small and large.  Today, as promised earlier, we are closing down the donations.  Also, we would like to give all the donors a small token of thanks by offering them a free subscription of the MySite Pro service!

It is going to work this way:

Every donor will get a free MySite Pro account for a period equivalent to the amount he has donated, plus a two months bonus subscription!  For example: If you have donated a total of say about $100, you are entitled for a 22 month ($100 donated / $4.49 subscription fee) + 2 months bonus subscription which comes to a total of 24 months!

So all the RapidFeeds supporters out there, what are you waiting for?  Go ahead and send us an email at donations@rapidfeeds.com if you would like to take this offer and give us the opportunity to show our gratitude!

Once again, thanks for your support!

There have been so many requests from our users, since the launch of MySite, for an option to remove the Credit Note (Powered by RapidFeeds) Link from the MySite widgets on a chargeable basis and a few other features; but we had some goals to attain before we could do this.  Today, we are glad to let you all know that we are now able to make it available to you!  We are today rolling out the Pro version of MySite!

Our services till now have been very successful and we thank all our users to bring them to this level.  RapidFeeds is really evolving and this was not possible without the faith our users have shown in our services all along the way and chosen us as their trusted partner for their RSS requirements.  And now, we are on the edge of rolling out our premium features and take RapidFeeds to the next level.

So what is MySite Pro?

MySite Pro is the premium version of MySite which is a powerful yet very easy to use syndication tool to display any RSS or Atom feed on your web pages and/or virally spread your content to bring back huge traffic to your website by allowing others to display your feeds on their websites with a link back to yours – all with a few clicks!

The Pro version is made available for those users who want an Ads Free and Fully Customizable– in short “fully owned” MySite Widgets, for a small fee.  With MySite Pro you get an Ads Free, Fully Customizable and Credit Note Free re-syndication service.   For more details please visit the details page here.

So, if you want that full control over the MySite Widgets you create, then go ahead and sign up for the Pro version today.  But if you are happy with the free version, you may please continue to use it as it remains free all the time.

We hope this release will make many of our users delighted and strengthen our relations further.

Enjoy the Pro!

Today we bring to you a small update suggested by a few of our users – The ability to manage feeds in local time zone. So far you could schedule feed items to be added / updated on the feeds on a later date / time. However, you could schedule the items only in the default time zone and had to manually calculate and adjust the time difference to your local time zone.

With this update released, you now have the ability to manage the feeds in your own time zone. All you need to do is set the time zone of your preference just once for a given feed and everything else will be taken care thereof. Here’s how you can do that:

Go to the Feed Configuration page (click on the ‘configure’ link in your FeedManager home) , then select the “Optionals” tab from the “Advanced” box at the bottom, choose your preferred time zone from the list in the “Time Zone” drop down and click the “Save Changes” button. And voila! You are done! From this point your feed will be managed in the time zone specified.

Hope this feature will be helpful to our users from different parts of the globe.

We are thankful to you all for giving us your valuable suggestions and feedback. We take all the feedback seriously and try our best to improve our services accordingly. So please keep sending in your suggestions at feedback@rapidfeeds.com.

Enjoy!