The NewsGator family of RSS reader products has dropped their paid-for license model, and is now offering all of its various clients for free.  Their products on various platforms that will now be free to use include:

• FeedDemon for Windows
• NetNewsWire for Mac OS X
• NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile or BlackBerry
• NewsGator Online
• NewsGator Inbox for Microsoft Outlook

This is good news for anyone who had been weighing up paying for these services I suppose.  I used NewsGator for a time and I think I recall paying around $30 for the FeedDemon client (a year’s license probably).  NewsGator’s big plus – for me – was that you could stay nicely in sync between your desktop RSS client or browser, and your Windows Mobile device.  Even with that advantage though, their Windows Mobile client never really matched up to NewsBreak and I stopped using it after a while.

One of the other reasons that I used to hear mentioned for folks considering NewsGator, was its Outlook Inbox add-on.  I wonder how many folks still find that attractive though – with the volume of feeds I follow now, there is no way I want them anywhere near my Inbox.

Over the years, like many of you, I’ve used various RSS readers and often multiple readers – such as NetVibes (which is really more of a start page and does other things as well) and Bloglines.  By now though, and for the last several months, Google Reader is almost my only RSS reader, and certainly my go-to, use every day, reader.  It’s free, fast, available to me everywhere I can connect to the web, and looks and works great on the iPhone.

So now NewsGator and its various client apps are free, I took another (admittedly quick) look at the online version this evening.  Not bad.  Didn;t knock my socks off either.  Not enough to have me thinking about leaving Google Reader aside. I’ll still give it a little longer look at some point here, but for now it has me wondering whether this move by NewsGator is just a bit late in the game (at least in terms of bringing in new users) – seems like now it will take something very compelling to have anyone switching away from Google Reader. 

Maybe their mobile clients are enough to provide that compelling reason.  When I used their Windows Mobile client some time ago, it did not win me over.  What do you all think? Have you tried out NewsGator on your mobile or desktop recently?  Or will you now that it’s free?