In these days I understand that it’s somehow delayed or 2nd priority, but if you look at UserVoice there are almost no responses to user’s ideas. The last one is from September.
Great question. I know that there are a lot of things going on in his neck of the woods, so I wouldn’t be surprised that other things have taken priority. It would be great to know his roadmap for more features.
That said, I purchased a lifetime membership (THANKS again for the great product!), but I am willing to contribute funds to the development of specific features.
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In general, development is in the support mode at the moment.
I’m fixing bugs and making little improvements:
- proxying almost everything since many sites started blocking requests from Hetzner (perhaps there are to many bots at Hetzner thanks to cheap traffic)
- improved layout on iPhone X (with rounded corners)
- improved performance of editing of the filters (people with 500 filters, 2-3k feeds each, produced considerable load when they edited filters)
- started work on open-sourcing but not yet finished it.
- implementing payments in rubles for people from Russia (Russian credit cards don’t work abroad now).
But no major new features are currently under the development.
Last year, I realized (perhaps a bit late) that there’s no future in Russia for my kids (and now there’s no present too) and started looking for ways to move abroad. I found a pretty good job in the UK and now I’m in the process of getting the visa.
Since I hope to get a full-time job soon, I’m afraid there will be no major new features in the reader. I might add something small and will keep reader running for sure. But I don’t think that something big will be added soon.
And right now I’m just too busy reading news and analytic articles, reacting to sanctions, saving business, money, and life, preparing everything needed for visa and for the move, and in general being shocked and trying to comprehend what has happened.
Who knows, maybe in future I will continue to work on the reader. Hard to give forecasts in the current situation.
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Thanks so much for all this information. I hope and pray that you and your family flourish, whatever may come. Your product has been one of the few internet brightspots for me (most products are vaporware or are quickly transformed into something else by bigger companies). I also love your ethos of making products for paying customers.
For those reasons, I am sad that you will be moving on to a full-time job (of course, I’m very happy for you personally, so it’s bittersweet).
I note that you are planning to opensource the reader. Does that mean that you anticipate your users being able to host their own instances?
Thank you again!
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Thank you for your wishes for me and my family.
Yes, I’m thinking to make it easy to self-host. Perhaps some Docker image or maybe single binary to run (or both). Thinking to compete with TT-RSS a bit 
There’s quite a lot of private stuff (API keys, SSL certificates, internal utilities, notes about issues of some users) which needs to be separated. And I’m thinking to use simple database like SQLite instead of Riak for self-hosting. So there’s some work which needs to be done.
It will be limited because there will be no commercial fonts, no keys to Twitter or Facebook API. But it should still be quite usable.
I think that not many people will bother to self-host, but it could bring additional marketing benefits (magazines and people love to write about free and opensource stuff). Plus, people that wouldn’t use hosted version anyway could use self-hosted BazQux. There’s a joy when people use product of your work even if they don’t pay for it. And of course it will allow reader to continue it’s life if anything will happen to me or the service.
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So if I understand correctly, the open-source version isn’t meant to let multiple people co-program the commercial version of BazQux?
Apart from that, I hope the current commercial version will last for many years to come. It is quite a pity, but understandable, that few functionalities will be added (for the time being) in the near future. I know the problem that it is very difficult to maintain a product in your spare time, especially with an attention-seeking family.
Fortunately, the current version of BazQux is functionally quite complete and I hope to enjoy it for years to come.
Hopefully you can call yourself (a bit of) British soon.
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I don’t expect that people will help me to write commercial software for free. But who knows, there could be simple patches for typos, documentation or improving the self-hosting part. I can get some help there but I don’t expect it to be substantial.
Looking forward to it, it will be usable as a backup site for sure!