Link: Nick Bradbury: NewsGator Acquires FeedDemon, TopStyle...and Me!.
First off, let me say that I'm an avid FeedDemon user and I like the software a lot. It was well worth the $30 I spend on it. Nick Bradbury built a great tool and I'm happy to see him doing well for himself.
That being said, I'm not really happy about this merger... mostly because I don't believe in a subscription model for a piece of software that sits on my machine that I don't get any support for. Newsgator is a subscription based tool and they've offered me a free two year subscription, but then I'll have to start paying for FeedDemon annually. I'm sure the support forums and other efforts are great... but I don't use any of them. If given the choice, I wouldn't sign up for support either. FeedDemon shouldn't break. Period. Its a piece of software that does a relatively simple thing... reads RSS feeds. I don't pay for my browser on a subscription model... how is this different? Its a really nice piece of software that I really like, but, not enough to pay an annual fee for it when I already paid for it once. I feel like I bought it, and basically now I have to pay again for it, just because the company merged. This isn't what I thought I signed up for.