NewsGator's RSS clients are now free!
We've got a lot of big news today at NewsGator. — First, we've got new releases of our most popular applications: FeedDemon 2.6, NetNewsWire 3.1, Inbox 3.0 (beta), and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. Each of these is a pretty major release on its own …
Context & Ripple Effects
NewsGator has turned two of the most established paid RSS readers into freeware in a single stroke: FeedDemon, which Nick Bradbury had been building out through the FeedDemon 2.0 beta cycle since early 2006, and NetNewsWire on the Mac. The giveaway lands two years after Google began treating feed plumbing itself as free infrastructure with its feed API, resetting what developers and users expect core syndication tools to cost.
The coordination is notable: the announcement broke simultaneously across the vendors' own blogs — Greg Reinacker for NewsGator, Brent Simmons's inessential.com for NetNewsWire, Bradbury for FeedDemon — covering four platforms at once. It comes against a backdrop where commentary had already framed RSS as the backbone of the blog-and-podcast era, making the client layer a strategic chokepoint rather than a hobbyist niche.
First-order effects
- NewsGator's desktop license revenue goes to zero overnight: FeedDemon 2.6, NetNewsWire 3.1, Inbox 3.0 beta, and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0 are all now free, and anyone who paid for prior versions gets the upgrades without paying again.
- The company instantly fields a cross-platform client footprint — Windows, Mac, Outlook integration, and Windows Mobile — that no single competitor currently matches for breadth.
Second-order effects
- Web-based reader operators lose their last price advantage over desktop clients, pushing competition in feed reading onto sync reliability and speed instead of cost.
- NewsGator's monetization necessarily migrates to whatever sits behind the clients — its hosted aggregator and synchronization service — turning the free installs into a funnel for paid server-side subscriptions.
Third-order effects
- If free clients become the norm, independent shareware feed readers that live on license fees are squeezed out unless they anchor themselves to a hosted backend, concentrating client development inside companies with server businesses.
- A zero-cost client layer accelerates mainstream feed adoption, reinforcing the position commentators already claimed for RSS in 2006–2007 as the sharing-and-syndication fabric of the post-2001 web.
The trend: RSS clients are shifting from paid shareware to free front ends whose value sits in hosted synchronization, completing the commoditization of the feed stack that Google started when it opened its feed API in 2005.