The Old Reader team runs an RSS reader that grew after Google Reader shut down, and its blog covers its finances and operations.
HN commenters cite it for the service's near-closure and later backing, and one praises its no-tracking approach; another doubts the developers' complaints about user growth.
> and when they moved to pay only (or they closed? i can't remember)
The incident you are thinking about, would be when they said they were going to close the service entirely, because of the volume of signups they had in the aftermath of Google Reader closing. https://blog.theoldreader.com/post/56798895350/desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures
In the end they did not do that, but realising any service I sign up for might close just as readily as Google Reader put me off RSS for years. (I am a paid The Old Reader user now.)
This whole Old Reader debacle is just absurd to me. According to this blog post[0], life for the developers has become "hell in every possible aspect we could imagine" as a result of all the users they've gotten since Google Reader shut down. But this makes no sense - why wouldn't you just start charging for access so that you can hire more people to run the site, and so that you don't get overwhelmed with more users than you can handle?
0: http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/56798895350/desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures
I really like the privacy features of TheOldReader.com -- especially their commitment so far to have no tracking (with cookies etc.) or user data harvesting to serve ads. They do have some select sponsored ads for the free-tier, but done without any such tracking [1].
[1] http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/113273709664/sponsor-the-old-reader
They were talking about letting unpaid customers go, but they found backing, to let them keep up the good work: http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/57274499607/the-new-old-reader
They address some of the problems in their new blog post.
http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/45337829605/unexpected-day-what-are-we-gonna-do-about-google#disqus_thread
http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/56798895350/desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures the actual source