Why only a 24 Hour Tour, and why only 500 people?

UPDATE: The 3 Hour Tour is now a 24 Hour Tour, with 500 users allowed at a time.

We want people to be able to test-drive FeedLounge before they sign up, however the nature of a web-based feed reader makes this a little more tricky than it may sound at first blush.

Generally, the questions we’re getting are something like this:

• Why only 24 hours?
• Why not a 30 day trial?
• Why only 500 users at a time?

The answer to all of these questions is basically this:

While we want everyone to be able to take a peek inside the ‘Lounge, we also have a commiment to keeping our production environment as fast as possible for our customers.

I’ll try to explain.

Running a web-based feed reader is very resource intensive¹. As an “Alex and Scott”-funded operation, FeedLounge doesn’t (yet) have the resources to run two full production systems. We don’t want to degrade the FeedLounge experience for our customers by allowing thousands of trials in our production system, so we’ve opted to set up the free tour on a separate, but less powerful system.

Since we are running the tour on less powerful hardware, we must limit the number of users that can be on the free tour. If we didn’t limit the number of users in the free tour, performance would suffer - and performance is an important part of the user experience.

Since we are limiting the number of simultaneous users that can take the tour, we felt it would be best to limit the duration of the tour so that everyone has a chance to try it out.

Hopefully that explains why we are offering the 24 Hour Tour instead of a longer trial period, open to an unlimited number of users. Please feel free to give us your feedback and thoughts in the forums.

1. The initial user sign-up with OPML import in particular is very resource intensive (generally the highest load a single user puts on the system). [back]