I sympathize with your sentiment but if you dig a little deeper you are asking Google and its shareholders to suffer a loss because you find something useful but do not want to pay of it. At its core this is a selfish argument. I am sure many users would be willing to pay Google a small amount to keep Google Reader alive but the problem is Google being a super large corp can not run the product with that much money. The same users can actually pay half that money to a company in India to build an equivalent product and get much superior and customer focused product than Google could build.