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One Year of FeedMail

Hi, It's Kevin, the founder of FeedMail.

Wow, time really flies. I missed FeedMail's birthday by a couple of days. On November 2nd 2021 I announced FeedMail publicly.

At the beginning I was going to make FeedMail just for myself. An RSS-to-email service that fit my needs. However I also wanted a way to provide email-subscriptions to my blog. I decided to roll these together and make FeedMail publicly available. This necessitated some extra features such as signup and billing but I think it was the right choice.

One year later I'm pretty happy with what FeedMail has become.

Features

I feel that FeedMail has all of the core features it needs. There are a few customer requests and some UX improvements in the queue but it seems that we now cover most features that someone would want out of a RSS-to-email service. The last big feature was releasing digests two months ago and with that our the door we are don't have any other major changes on the roadmap.

Of course if were are missing functionality that you would like to see please reach out to support. We are always open to new ideas.

Sustainability

One year later FeedMail is covering it's operating costs. That's a pretty significant milestone for sustainability of the service. When I first launched it I planned to cover most of the costs myself. However due to a handful of paying customers we have been able to cover our operating costs for the first year. Thank you!

It isn't the end of the journey though. Our costs were lower in the first year due to some introductory discounts and free trials. At this point I expect our costs to be steady however we are slowly burning savings.

Not only that but many of our users' purchases will last them multiple years. This means that new customers are critical to sustainability. It will likely be another 1-2 years before we start seeing significant recurring income.

But that is expected! We were aiming to provide a low-cost service so per-user revenue will be small. It will take more users to cover the minimum cost of operating the service and hopefully we can get there in a couple more years. In the meantime I am happy to cover the difference as I want the service for myself anyways.

Of course if you know someone who would like FeedMail it is always appreciated if you spread the word. If you do feel free to use our Referral Program to get a small reward for yourself and a longer trial for your referee.

Abuse

Abuse and Reputation were my biggest concerns launching the service. Sending email can be tricky business since reputation is everything. Not only that but we were sending user-controlled content which may be likely to set off automated filters. However we took care. Most of all ensuring that all emails were validated before sending them user-controlled content of any type as well as some rate limits and other protections.

In fact the only abuse that we identified was free-trial abuse. We saw a chain of accounts each with the same subscription list, each created as soon as the previous free-trial expired. This set off some of our basic heuristics and then we took manual action.

We definitely won't let our guard down but it is good to know that we are a much harder and less valuable target for abuse than other services on the internet.

Stability

Over the past year FeedMail has been quite stable. We had two major outages, neither of which caused notifications to be lost. There were also a handful of smaller problems such as issues with particular feeds or email addresses but these have become less frequent as the service matured. FeedMail now mostly runs itself as we continue to move slowly and steadily.

Looking Forward

The future is bright and boring, just the way I like it. FeedMail will continue to operate much like it does now. We will slowly add new features and refine our UX but we don't have any big changes planned.

If you have any ideas, suggestions or just want to say hi we are always happy to hear from our customers. Just reach out to our support address.

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