I see your point crystal clear. But what happens when I don't make you choose a max of 64 feeds? I still have to fetch 100% of your other feeds, which could be in the hundreds. And I have to do this for every single user, which is currently in the thousands (ohh, my poor server). It just doesn't scale with my economics. If I were Google, sure, I could just throw money at more machines. As it is, I'm stuffing envelopes full of cash and sending it to Linode.
Ideally, I'd make all feeds free and updated every 5 minutes. Realistically, if I force you to choose, I can perform that much better for everybody else. It's a trade-off which I try to stack in my favor by giving the user an easy-to-use UI to activate different feeds as they choose under the standard account.
You could pay $12 a year and get unlimited feeds. That would make both of us very happy. :-)
First, just give them 64 feeds and tell them about it on some form of status bar. The "updating your feeds 63/64" progress bar, but maybe yellow with "We're only updating 64 of your feeds. [a href="why-premium/"]Why?[/a]"
Also, you can choose those 64 feeds to update as a union of what they have subscribed to and what you're currently already having to fetch, thereby making the necessary amount of work for each new user theoretically less in the best case, and no worse in the worst case.
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I see your point crystal clear. But what happens when I don't make you choose a max of 64 feeds? I still have to fetch 100% of your other feeds, which could be in the hundreds. And I have to do this for every single user, which is currently in the thousands (ohh, my poor server). It just doesn't scale with my economics. If I were Google, sure, I could just throw money at more machines. As it is, I'm stuffing envelopes full of cash and sending it to Linode.
Ideally, I'd make all feeds free and updated every 5 minutes. Realistically, if I force you to choose, I can perform that much better for everybody else. It's a trade-off which I try to stack in my favor by giving the user an easy-to-use UI to activate different feeds as they choose under the standard account.
You could pay $12 a year and get unlimited feeds. That would make both of us very happy. :-)
You can make this much easier on yourself.
First, just give them 64 feeds and tell them about it on some form of status bar. The "updating your feeds 63/64" progress bar, but maybe yellow with "We're only updating 64 of your feeds. [a href="why-premium/"]Why?[/a]"
Also, you can choose those 64 feeds to update as a union of what they have subscribed to and what you're currently already having to fetch, thereby making the necessary amount of work for each new user theoretically less in the best case, and no worse in the worst case.