Yikes. Avantgo is about to create massive breakage in its custom channels. According to Tom’s Hardware reports that businesses — including several large companies — were uusing the custom channels for enterprise use rather than paying upwards of $10,000 for the dedicated server that Avantgo wanted to sell them.
Avantgo’s solution — any custom channel with more than eight subscribers will have to pay a minimum of $1,000 per year. Over 100 subscribers? Try a minimum of $4,000 per year.
Of course a lot of hobbyist-type web sites use Avantgo for custom feeds and those are about to disappear. As Tom’s Hardware puts it,
But what about antagonising users? Capping readers for each custom channels at eight seems generous: tomorrow thousands of Avantgo subscribers will see links to their custom channels break. Avantgo advises users to email custom channels, asking them to provide a full subscriber service, but if the content providers don’t play ball, the service becomes somewhat less necessary.
This apparently doesn’t impact full channels, but it would seem like only a matter of time before folks there with thousands of subscribers are asked to pay up as well.
Personally I don’t think it is unreasonable to charge for this sort of service, but I think Avantgo is targeting the wrong market when restricting itself entirely to large corporate clients who may (or may not) be willing to pay $4,000 – $10,000 per year for their service. They’d do well to consider a second tier service at more reasonable prices for smaller web sites.
And long term, both Microsoft and Palm should build this sort of functionality into the OS. I should be able to set up an XML file on my site and then go to my Palm or Pocket PC, enter the URL for the XML file, and then have my PDA update automatically every time I synchronize based on the parameters in the XML file.