Hacker News Reader

It's difficult to scale an RSS reader as you could quickly start having to crawl orders of magnitude number of feeds more than you are now as you get more users, if power users like your thing. I know because I worked at Bloglines. You're either going to need money or you will shut it down eventually.

I have faith people are going to pay if they use it and like it.

That's the point - the "pro" version only gives you a silly, feel-good feature, but it (might) increase revenue when people feel they're actually getting something.

"I wanted to offer the service to people that might not be able to afford it, and not have them punished by having fewer features."

That's neat, why don't consider some kind of sponsorship program? A user that can pay, can sponsor one or two more users who can't, that would be nice :)

That's an AWESOME idea, actually!