I originally started Subworthy to scratch a very personal itch - to control and focus my media consumption. After using it privately for over half a year I decided to open it up to anyone that that wanted to register for an account.

Response was better than expected and I attracted a number of engaged core users - but the service was free to use.

Subworthy, like any other service on the internet, costs money to run. Not large sums of money by any stretch of the imagination, but between server costs and bulk email delivery, it certainly isn’t free.

The obvious course of action was to start charging for usage - but with the current set of features I personally didn’t feel that it deserved to be a paid service. So I started to dream up ‘power’ features that I could charge for.

I soon realised that I didn’t particularly want or need these features for my own use - and if I wasn’t adding any value for myself, then was it worth investing the time and effort into developing features that others would maybe see the value in (enough to pay for)?

So I’ve made the decision to close down Subworthy - at least, the publicly accessible part of it. I’ve already reached out to the existing users to help them to export the feeds they subscribe to, and as of July 11 Subworthy will cease to send out its daily emails. I will still use an incarnation of the service privately, and at some point I’ll probably open-source the code so others can setup their own service.

For now, though, I’m grateful for the experience and to those that joined me on this six month journey.