I built Ponyfish as a side project in April 2006 when I was frustrated by the lack of RSS feeds on so many of the sites that I visited frequently. "It's 2006! Don't these guys know that bookmarks aren't relevent anymore? RSS is the future!" After launching the project and getting a ton of positive feedback, it made sense to me to add on some premium features and charge a nominal fee in order to cover server costs. I don't think I ever made more than a couple hundred dollars a month, but I had a tool that I was using heavily and some bonus beer money.
A lot's changed in the last five years. As the web matured, more sites adopted RSS, and use of Ponyfish waned. And then more and more users started consuming their content on sites like Twitter, and use of RSS appeared to wane as well. I personally haven't had a need for Ponyfish for over a year. From time to time, I had grand ideas of how Ponyfish could grow beyond the original concept. But those thoughts quickly faded, and I don't think I've touched the codebase in 4 years. This was always a side project for me, and I've long since moved on to bigger and better things.
A year ago, I shut down all the billing systems so premium users wouldn't get charged anymore. And today, I think it's finally time to shut down the service as a whole. There are just too many bugs that are never going to get fixed, occasional system issues that I have zero time to address, and I'd rather take the service down than provide a false sense that there's still someone at the helm. I appreciate all the users that used and loved the service while it was around. I hope the shuttering of the service doesn't materially impact the few of you that are left. I plan to take the service down on August 15, 2011.
Thanks for your support,
Ade Olonoh