14 ms·

Goodbye, Feedly

189 points by erikgahner 4y ago

elyseum 4y ago
So you liked Feedly for almost 10 years, but never bothered to support them financially. And now you complain that they go the extra mile trying to earn money?
- motoxpro 4y ago
  Exactly. It's so comical. You were never going to support them making their software, never going to upgrade, never going to provide any value to them in anyway even though they provided value to you for 10 years. Seems like this is a good thing for feedly.
  - aflag 4y ago
    The author acknowledged that though. He seemed to even had considered buying it, but thought it was not worth it. He eventually settled on something simple and free. It doesn't surprise me that running a simple RSS feed tool is not profitable.
    - simonw 4y ago
      There is very little simple about running an RSS aggregator, especially at scale.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - wahnfrieden 4y ago
        I run one at scale, it doesn’t need to be done in a complicated way
        wahnfrieden 4y ago
        What I’m saying is by running so many heavy services in the backend, relying on a series of API integrations to provide service and taking custody of swaths of sometimes sensitive user data, they make their own problems
      - aflag 4y ago
        The user doesn't really care about the scale, though. There are chrome plugins, local apps, etc. With dropbox and other similar tools, you can sync across devices and keep configuration stored in the cloud without much hassle. I'm not saying that what feedly was doing was trivial. I'm sure it was expensive and required many developers, designers, etc. However, that doesn't mean that all the effort is necessarily important for the end user.
    - motoxpro 4y ago
      That's 100% reasonable. What's not reasonable is spending time to write a blog post in a tone that makes it seem like the product "is bad". The may not like it but the author wasn't a customer. It's the classic "I would buy it/pay for it if it only had XYZ or did/didn't do ABC." When in reality they were never going to pay for it, they just wanted something simple and free, which is 100% fine.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    for apparently nonsense features. this isn’t a patronage model, it’s a product (and the free tier is not what’s being sold)
    - motoxpro 4y ago
      That was my point. They are not a charity, they are a business. It's not their job to build features for people who have been using the service for 10 year with no intention to upgrade. This person wants a simple free rss reader, all good.
      - wahnfrieden 4y ago
        (misread your tone completely)
pndy 4y ago
I've left Feedly at the first sight of premium options few years ago - I wanted to try something new and it worked for a while. But RSS reader in bookmarks (livemarks as Mozilla once called these) is and tbh always was enough for me. Foxish live RSS does job nicely in Vivaldi.
ismaildonmez 4y ago
https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/ is still the best thing after Google Reader.
- radiosnob 4y ago
  I rarely ever pay for services on the web. But I will pay for theoldreader. My mind is getting foggy with age, but I think it does everything that Google Reader did, and not much more. The perfect drop-in replacement.
- martini333 4y ago
  Ugly UI.
  - ismaildonmez 4y ago
    So was Google Reader, and it worked fine. That's the whole point.
    - Gualdrapo 4y ago
      Google Reader's UI wasn't that bad imho.
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  I tried it when they started, it was a sluggish mess that also did not use the browser cache correctly. Maybe I noticed because I had thousands of RSS feeds, I dunno. Granted, that was a decade ago so I hope they improved it since. I stick to https://newsblur.com/ https://newsblur.com/. It has it's quirks but is way, way faster (two days ago a redesign came out that makes it so fast I feel like I'm using the old Google Reader again)
  - stereoradonc 4y ago
    I read about their redesign today. I was with them for about 5+ years but then eventually shifted to Inoreader.
dafi70 4y ago
I agree with you about useless PRO features. I loved the 'Mute filters' feature, but they ruined it forcing to use Leo, expressions like "title:HackerNews" are no longer available and LEO is less useful than a simple search by keyword but... there is a "but", I use Feedly APIs and I love them, I developed apps for myself to aggregate and quickly find informations starting from the feeds, using Feedly is so easy, so I continue to pay for a really small subset of features only to be able to extract info from my RSS feeds
smitty1e 4y ago
I'm torn between the love of Free Stuff and the understanding that even Free Stuff costs money.
- lbriner 4y ago
  It's not even a choice between free and not-free, sometimes you would be happy to pay but then the tool becomes bloatware. As the OP said, why do you need two vertical menus for an RSS reader? Why not hide the advanced stuff under an advanced menu or allow customising what is and isn't visible? Plenty of apps/sites become popular on a strong core USP which people want and then add a tonne of cruft as they pretend they are adding value, when in many cases it is just noise that only a few people want/use but everyone else has to suffer the UX changes along the way.
karolist 4y ago
For many years I'm using ReadKit for Mac and couldn't be happier. Paid once in like 2014 and the app is still getting updates plus I get to my content without third parties. Why use a web service for something that doesn't need a backend to function?
hestefisk 4y ago
NetNewsWire user here. It’s very good. Would love one running on Linux natively.
- shimmeringleaf 4y ago
  Seconded, it would be lovely to have cross platform. Simple and just works without fuss. Now, if only more websites would have RSS feeds these days.. it's been a steady decline.
  - timbit42 4y ago
    QuiteRSS. It even runs on OS/2.
- thombles 4y ago
  The closest equivalents I’ve found on other platforms are Akregator (Linux/KDE) and QuiteRSS (Win).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
andyjohnson0 4y ago
I dont understqnd this attitude. I use feedly and like the author of tfa I don't pay them any money, so I ignore the junk. This is the price you have to pay when you get something for free. I have a lot of sympathy for feedly: it seems like a really hard thing to get people to pay for. What does the author think feedly should do with its free tier? Before feedly I self hosted TinyTinyRss for a while (kind of slow) and before that Google Reader. And before that Newsblur. I never paid for any of them and now I have more than enough paid subscriptions for stuff. Reading rss feeds just doesn't make it over the line of things I'd be willing to pay for. Edit: I pay £10/month for Adobe Creative Cloud and get Photoshop, Lightroom, XD, Illustrator, etc. I pay ~£8/month for Office 365 and get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. All massively rich and powerful tools. Why does feedly imagine I would want to pay £5/month to read rss feeds?
- tribby 4y ago
  > I ignore the junk. This is the price you have to pay when you get something for free. clearly it isn’t, or the author wouldn’t have been able to move to a free alternative without any junk to ignore.
  - andyjohnson0 4y ago
    I probably didn't express myself sufficiently clearly. I'm pleased that the author has moved from a Web app to local, open source apps. Definitely a good move, particularly on mobile. What I don't get is going to the effort of writing a blog post about the annoyance of using the free tier of a service provided by a commercial business. That tier is there to let people try the service. It's not surprising that the experience isn't friction-free: it's not meant to be.
    - Adraghast 4y ago
      > It's not surprising that the experience isn't friction-free: it's not meant to be. This is an argument for the intentional creation of bad software.
kken 4y ago
NewsBlur is pretty good and does exactly what it is intended for.
UrgentOpinion 4y ago
One of the most useful features of Feedly for me was that you could export full articles with highlights as PDFs. Yet to find another RSS reader that can do this - am currently using Inoreader's highlighting features.
longrod 4y ago
Going through the article I realized this attitude is what eventually kills some really good software. If a software does what you expect it to do and does it well but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing purposes...is that really so bad? Live and let live, I say. Not everyone is running a charity and Feedly is nowhere even near the top of the list of software ripping off their users or selling their data to make money. What the author labels as "cluttered" is really not that cluttered at all. It looks much better than an completely empty list in the alternative they prefer. But that's just UI. I am not saying don't move to another alternative. I am just saying that the reasons the author is calling Feedly out for are unjustified and don't really make sense.
- PainfullyNormal 4y ago
  > but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing purposes...is that really so bad? If you have two viable options where one is a profound annoyance to you and one isn't, why wouldn't you choose the second option?
  - applefangirl 4y ago
    True, and in the case of the Mac you've got a lot of good options with different design choices.
- hamdouni 4y ago
  > that the reasons the author is calling Feedly out for are unjustified and don't really make sense. Well, at least it is justified and make sense for the author.
- prepend 4y ago
  > is that really so bad? I think in many situations, yes. I grew up with shareware and so I know that prompts are necessary to drive income. What the prompts in this article are so bad at is that they are perpetual. Is it really necessary to nag a user over and over for something they don’t want and declined? That is probably not going to work in the long run as people associate a bad experience with the product. Figure out a better way to get income that doesn’t involve perpetually wasting a user’s time and frustrating them.
jollins 4y ago
This writer is really entitled. It is a free tier for a service that costs money to host and maintain. Of course there are upgrade prompts. I use Feedly (free) as a hosting service, and Reeder or one of the other many great RSS client apps as the frontend to it, so I don’t have to see the feedly interface.But the Feedly API I use constantly and it is extremely solid. That’s part of the greatness of RSS services. If the service’s UI bothers you, you don’t have to use it.
- lbriner 4y ago
  I think that is a bit unfair. Many of us have used something that was originally a certain way and worked and we have let it get embedded and useful at which point it becomes more and more complicated, maybe the upgrade prompts become much more prominent and we feel let down by something that doesn't actually solve the problem any more. I don't know Feedly's history and whether it was originally Open Source or not but plenty of people decide their popular FOSS tool could be paid-for, at which point it is common to disenfranchise the people who made it popular in the first-place.
  - jzb 4y ago
    If you have a problem solved by software, pay for it. They’re not a charity. If you’re just using without giving back you have zero standing to feel let down. Feedly is a SaaS, not a foss project. They have bills to pay.
    - hamdouni 4y ago
      Foss project also have bills to pay.
      - Semiapies 4y ago
        People regularly act like asses to them without contributing a cent, either.
- prepend 4y ago
elcapitan 4y ago
I left Feedly for the same reason a while ago. I think there is a trend of "editorialization" of all kinds of apps that tries to sell new features and "experiences" to users instead of focusing on the core ideas, which I find really annoying. Plus the Feedly UI itself is annoying and doesn't give me a simple mailbox-like view like normal RSS readers. The solution I went with is native RSS readers (like the author), but backed by an Open Reader server (The Old Reader in my case, but there are others) for syncing between devices. On the Mac, Vienna as a client is quite nice.
Semaphor 4y ago
> I started using it because of its simplicity and minimalism. That is so weird to me. I tried pretty much everything there was back then (eventually settled on Newsblur only to switch to self-hosted TT-RSS after they raised prices when I already barely got any use out of their features) and Feedly always seemed like one of the most bloated/featureful (pick your choice here :D) options there was.
frenkel 4y ago
Feedbin is what the author wants. It is even open source.
- edvinasbartkus 4y ago
  second that! and NetNewsWire is a great companion to Feedbin when you want native experience on iPad/iPhone/Mac.
scarface74 4y ago
I deleted Feedly from my phone a long time ago for some reason. I can’t remember why. It wasn’t because I didn’t like it. I redownloaded it a few weeks ago and it was a shit show. I looked for other alternatives and I found NetNewsWire. It has a long history of first being a commercial product by an indy Mac dev. He sold it to another company, reacquired the rights, updated it and now it’s free and open source for the Mac and iOS. It’s clean and does the basics.
naugtur 4y ago
If you liked it before all the monetization strategies, maybe should have paid for it to keep it sustainable that way?
- prepend 4y ago
  I don’t think so. It would just be nagging for other things. I think this is a design philosophy by Feedly and paying just pushes the problem down the road. I pay for creative cloud and there’s so many ads and pitches for new products. I long for the days where I pirated ps6 and never had any ads (or paid for it too).
- jacurtis 4y ago
  I'm am a huge proponent for paying for good software to support developers and creators. HOWEVER, I think you sentiment is wrong here. You _should_ support creators that are doing things you like so that they keep doing those things you like. But it doesn't make sense to pay creators that are doing think you don't like. The fact that you start paying them is taken as confirmation that you are enjoying the product. Imagine if we all hated Feedly's product but banded together to have everyone subscribe to Feedly to support them. They would see that userbase as confirmation to keep doing what they are doing, building shitty software. They aren't going to about face their product strategy because you are paying them $6 a month now. So instead what we should all do is find creators that are doing RSS readers justice and support THOSE creators. For example, I switched from Feedly to Feedbin. I was a free user at Feedly and never wanted to upgrade because, like the author of the article said, it was bloated and unejoyable and the premium features weren't things I needed. So instead I found a tool that is everything I wanted, which happened to be FeedBin. I supported them and am paying them $5 per month for them to continue their efforts because they are building the software the way I want RSS Readers to be. So I would like to see them survive and thats what my paid subscription provides. Let's encourage good products. No reason to throw good money at bad products. Find the good ones and support those.
lf-non 4y ago
I use a self-hosted yarr [1] instance for rss. It is really minimal and very easy to run (self contained native binary). [1] https://github.com/nkanaev/yarr https://github.com/nkanaev/yarr
stereoradonc 4y ago
Try Inoreader. Besides a bevy of rich feature set, Inoreader has sales ONLY on Black Friday, and they usually extend the service by an additional 6 months if you pay yearly. It lacks Feedly's stupid UI. It's functional, fast, and I can zip through hundreds of feeds in no time. My favourite is the IFTTT and Readwise integration baked in. Alternatively, you can have the complete experience in Vivaldi itself. It comes with the RSS reader and a mail client. Absolute DOPE! Inoreader allows you to keep track of specific keywords and automatically follow the RSS feeds. I am waiting for a better UI around Vivaldi's RSS reader, and will reevaluate my RSS reader needs close to the end of the subscription period.
- 369548684892826 4y ago
  And the ad-free tier is much better value than Feedly, like one quarter of the price even if you don't do the Black Friday thing.
- roldie 4y ago
  Another shoutout for Inoreader. Been using it for years. The free tier is great, but the paid tier is seriously one of the best investments I've ever made
  - stereoradonc 4y ago
    Completely agree! It's an investment in serious reading. I track over 600+ feeds (and counting) and Inoreader helps me to speed up the process.
- bscphil 4y ago
  I've recommended Inoreader multiple times on this site before, but unfortunately the service has gotten worse over the years by a couple of metrics. Most of the worthwhile features are now gated behind the most expensive plan, rather than being properly staggered. I subscribe to so few feeds I could literally use the free (ad-supported) plan, and I use none of the advanced features at all except filters. If you want to filter a single feed, you have to buy the most expensive plan they sell. That's crazy! Regardless, I have happily supported them for years. I'm not the sort of user that others are complaining about in this thread that wants everything for free. That's about to change too though. Since the site began, the plan I've been on has cost $30 a year, which is acceptable for the value I get out of it. I was able to extend the plan for multiple years at $18/yr thanks to Black Friday and Christmas sales. Now, however, they're changing things around, and want me to resubscribe to keep the features I use at $90/yr (or $120 if you pay monthly). I'm not a software engineer making six figures. I can't afford to throw $100 at every service I use like this. A $30 -> $90 price increase is just enormous. Again, I want to pay for the features I use, but because they've failed to provide any kind of pricing ramp, they'll soon get nothing from me.
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
Do you think there's an opportunity for a new RSS reader to emerge? And be financially successful, without the BS of ads, etc?
- criddell 4y ago
  No.
- cosmiccatnap 4y ago
  An open source RSS reader could easily be someone's weekend project...
  - Semiapies 4y ago
    And probably has been many times, given how many there are.
poisonborz 4y ago
You can use Feedly simply as a cloud service to store your RSS subscriptions. There's a number of good clients that use it and display a simple feed that you want. For Android, there is FeedMe.
lawgimenez 4y ago
I have been using Reeder for years now, I use it also for read it later integrated with Pocket. I love the latest update because I get to set the fonts to San Francisco Rounded which is one of my favorite fonts.
butz 4y ago
Miniflux works great for me. Took a few months to get used to minimal layout, but it has everything that I need to read RSS feeds. I'm using paid hosted version, but there is an open source version which can be self-hosted.
- Rudism 4y ago
  Second this. I've been self-hosting Miniflux for years and love it. It's dead simple to run (a single executable daemon or docker container that you can run behind a reverse proxy) and it sounds like exactly what the author of this article is looking for--no frills RSS reader with a very minimalist interface.
PaulKeeble 4y ago
FreshRSS (https://freshrss.org/ https://freshrss.org/) is self hosted and its what I have been using for years. There are a variety of RSS web readers you can deploy to a home server or NAS or even just a raspberry pi stuck in the corner they aren't very resource intensive as programs and the docker images make them really easy to deploy.
- Macha 4y ago
  Been using freshrss and mostly happy with it. The UI is a little clunky but the biggest wishlist item is if they let me use article dates from feeds rather than fetch dates everywhere
boboche 4y ago
Same path here, google, feedly, ragequit feedly due to bloat/jirafication, now inoreader. Up to 150 feeds supported, works awesome on ipad and web.
madsbuch 4y ago
Growth vs. value, development vs. maintenance, innovation vs. operations. It really seems like a lot of projects should embrace the the path of becoming a stable product: Charging 10 USD a year, assigning a single person to a comfy job of maintaining the app without adding new features. Just maintaining infrastructure, updating packages, and doing the occasional exchange of stack when old technologies are deprecated... Why doesn't that happen more?
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Investors looking for returns What you’re describing is a kind of anti growth public service. Sounds nice!
- Semiapies 4y ago
  Most people don't actually want to pay for things.
t6jvcereio 4y ago
If you like simplistic, why not newsboat? I bet you it's faster than any POS web app https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/
jefftk 4y ago
> One of the features is that I will get “new articles up to 10x faster”. What’s that supposed to mean? That I have not been getting new articles straight away when I visit Feedly? One of the features of Pro is that they'll pull the feeds you're subscribed to at a higher frequency. I think this is an example of doing freemium well!
- Gualdrapo 4y ago
  Was going to mention this. For example, I see HN posts via Feedly. But after each fetch for "new" articles, the most recent ones it shows me from HN are from an hour ago at least. For some other websites it pulls their "most recent" content from the previous day.
dwighttk 4y ago
Huh. I use Feedly but access it through Reeder and don’t seem to have many troubles. Every once in a while I think of unsubscribing to a feed and it is a bit of an adventure, but that is my only complaint.
- b-lee 4y ago
  BTW I didn't understand the need for connecting Feedly to reader. Why didn't you simply import the OPML from Feedly to Reeder?
  - dwighttk 4y ago
    I set it up 9 years ago and OPML import was not made obvious to me. Or possibly: I think I was using NetNewsWire on desktop or something when I set it up, so maybe it was obvious but I wanted read-syncing between different platforms.
sascha_sl 4y ago
Feedly has put a lot more effort into being a research tool, probably mostly for marketing in the past, well, years. Of course it clashes with being a simple RSS reader for the author. This is just mismatched expectations, not Feedly getting worse.
t6jvcereio 4y ago
Is it known why Google killed reader? Certainly it wasn't lack of traction.
- timbit42 4y ago
  They're a business. I would presume they weren't able to make enough, or perhaps any, profit off of it.
otsaloma 4y ago
The author complains he couldn't add a Reddit RSS feed. I once looked into this. It was already a few years ago, but I guess it hasn't changed. The problem is that updating all Reddit feeds of all Feedly users goes way above Reddit's API call rate limits. So, it's probably simply not possible in a centralized free service. The problem isn't so much Feedly, but the various sites' (not only Reddit) ignorance or hostility towards RSS that results in these kinds of implementations.
- Uupis 4y ago
  reddit provides RSS feeds: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss
  - Macha 4y ago
    The parent poster even acknowledged this. The point is the feed is rate limited. And you need one call per unique subreddit. And Feedly's users collectively have more unique subreddits than the Reddit rate limit.
    - pavel_lishin 4y ago
      Strange; I can subscribe to user rss feeds in Newsblur. I'm guessing Newsblur somehow rotates through all the users' collective RSS feeds in some manner to not trip the rate limit, which might explain why new posts don't show up immediately. (Which is fine for me as a user; most of the reddit RSS feeds I subscribe to, I don't need to see immediately!)
    - Uupis 4y ago
      Ah, my bad. The reference to API made me think they're replicating RSS via the reddit API. I was not aware that RSS feeds are so rate-limited, too. More on the subject, for anyone curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/4u9tj8/rss_feeds_update_interval_skyrocketed_to_180/ https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/4u9tj8/rss_feeds_upda...
sys_64738 4y ago
I moved to InoReader after the Google Reader cull and must say it’s been pretty consistent in quality. I usually pick up a good deal around Thanksgiving.
htk 4y ago
For those in the Apple ecosystem I recommend NetNewsWire. It can sync with iCloud without needing any extra services. I use it on my Macs, iPads and iPhone. (I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy user)
r2222 4y ago
I’ve been very happy with https://feedbin.com https://feedbin.com It’s a paid RSS syncing service and web app too, costs $5 per month, I use it with Reeder (and NetNewsWire etc). It doesn’t have any social cruft or AI assistants or ML companions. I was also a Feedly user when I decided to try Feedbin, and I immediately noticed how much faster fetching the feeds was on Feedbin. I also like to have my email newsletters in same place (forward them to a Feedbin-provided email address), and I can have filters to mark things like sponsored posts and podcast show notes as read automatically, basically like mute filters. Feedly premium tier costs pretty much the same, and I wonder how well it would stack against Feedbin. There’s also Inoreader which I think offers pretty similar feature set for a pretty similar price. Feedly free tier is excellent, and you can work around many of its shortcomings by using an RSS reader app. For example, Feedly free doesn’t offer full text articles, but I can extract the full text with Reeder/NetNewsWire/etc on the client-side. If you really don’t care about speed, mute filters, or reading newsletters in your RSS reader, then Feedly free tier is already more than enough.
- Semiapies 4y ago
  Feedbin is pretty great. I was particularly glad it was paid, early on, because that made it more likely to actually stay around.
- jacurtis 4y ago
  I switched from Feedly to FeedBin recently for all the same reasons and noticed all the same things you highlighted here. I don't mind the nominal fee of $5/mo since it is a delightful experience that is powerful, fast, and clean. They have added features that I think we need, without the Bloat. Ironically Feedly is only $1 more per month, but I was never enticed to upgrade because the experience was really just awful. FeedBin also gives access to a solid API for you to manage your feeds and supports all the open standards as well to easily import/export them. I think the takeaway for product owners is that sometimes you need to really zoom out and look at your product. I used Feedly for 8-9 years as a free user and never wanted to upgrade. I was willing to for the right product, but never did. Once I found a simpler product (FeedBin) that met my needs, I immediately paid. Feedly has shoved ads and half-assed new features into their product for almost a decade trying to get their influx of Google Reader subscribers to upgrade. But no one was compelled to. It eventually pissed off free users enough that they switch to other paid alternatives. That's pretty sad honestly.
protonbob 4y ago
Is there an easy to use self hosted solution for this?
- hairofadog 4y ago
  If you’re on a Mac or iOS you can use Reeder, which syncs to iCloud and eliminates the need for any other cloud service. I think other RSS apps may do the same.
  - astrostl 4y ago
    Reeder (et al.) + iCloud sync was a game-changer for me too.
voisin 4y ago
My biggest pet peeve with Feedly is that it doesn’t allow for filtering by keyword (which could be done on-device to save server resources if that’s a concern) without a monthly subscription that includes tons of things I don’t care about, like this AI thing and whatnot. I’d even pay a one time fee for this right. But forcing users to pay for something so simple in perpetuity seems ridiculous.
livelace 4y ago
Cannot stay away, because I'm a guy who used Google Reader and moved all my RSS stuff 1-2 years before Google Reader was finally closed. I tried to use Feedly and other tools, but at that time I decided to use rss2email. Right now I have my own tool (https://github.com/livelace/gosquito https://github.com/livelace/gosquito) for data gathering from different sources. One way to use it - just put news into mail system (I'm Zimbra user - https://paste.pics/7f48e9ca655de96f2160ecbff474bbca https://paste.pics/7f48e9ca655de96f2160ecbff474bbca, and I use internal search engine heavily). I don't depend on external services and can process data as I want.
almog 4y ago
After going through Google Reader, Feedly, Newsblur and QuiteRSS, I've finally settled on Newsboat, as I can really customize it to my needs, debug it and even integrate custom html to rss generators. For example, ebay has recently recently stopped supporting RSS through search results (an '_rss=1' query string was supported for over 10 years), and while there are some workaround such as using different search endpoint where the RSS has not been deprecated yet, with Newsboat, I was able to write a custom filter to extract RSS with just few lines of code: https://github.com/almog/newsboat-ebay2rss-filter https://github.com/almog/newsboat-ebay2rss-filter
pHollda 4y ago
daggersandscars 4y ago
If you're looking for a cross-Apple-ecosystem reader, News Explorer provides MacOS, iOS, and iPadOS apps and uses iCloud to sync. No affiliation, just like using it. If you're only following feeds on MacOS, NetNewsWire is also great.
- kenada 4y ago
  NetNewsWire has had an iOS version for a while now.
benrapscallion 4y ago
I pay for NewsBlur and have been doing so for years. It is an underappreciated, excellent, fully-featured, indie RSS feed reader with support for twitter and youtube etc. It can extract full text from feeds. It can both receive emails (newsletters) and send emails (when a feed updates). They have an excellent free tier. I have tried every other competitor and no one comes close.
nXqd 4y ago
Reading through the article, Feedly might just have a classic, fast version without any new features and charge users for it. And those who wants new fancy things can enjoy the fancy version. And I believe, there are many users who just want fast and simple software these days, and early version of feedly was a great example.
keithnz 4y ago
I find feedly works really great. I'm on the free tier, my UI is relatively uncluttered, they introduce new things from time to time, but mostly it's the same as when I first started when google reader shutdown. I get this author doesn't like it, but it all seems a bit overly dramatic for a few feeds.
pretdl 4y ago
gaul 4y ago
https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/ is a free software, self-hosted alternative and https://ttrss.info/ https://ttrss.info/ is a paid hosted offering.
cosmiccatnap 4y ago
Have we really fallen this low? How are there so many people in this comment section defending feedly while berating the author for what I would consider a level headed and fair assessment of the state of it. As someone hunting constantly for a reader as simple as Google reader and feedly use to be it all makes perfect sense and is equally frustrating to me. It's an RSS reader that no longer accepts many RSS feeds, that is a more than valid criticism and we should be allowed to be picky about that without being berated by our fellow HN readers.
- Macha 4y ago
  HN readers generally put themselves into the vendor's shoes and therefore have a hard time accepting criticism of something the vendor does at their own interest at the expense of the user's.
thrdbndndn 4y ago
I've tried all the free services listed in this thread, and feedly is the best for me. I'd admit I never really like it's UI, but it's usable. And it didn't change much all these years. Nowadays, I meanly just use the extension "Feedly Notifier" [1] to read (or open directly) articles in my browser, so I barely open feedly.com anymore. I highly recommend it. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/feedly-notifier/egikgfbhipinieabdmcpigejkaomgjgb?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/feedly-notifier/eg...
browningstreet 4y ago
I pay for Feedly, and have since the beginning, but I don’t love it. Their search function has severe usability issues, which I’ve emailed them, and their enhanced features are stupid and useless. I don’t like Feedly, and use Unread on the iPhone to read the feeds. They are like the Evernote of today. Every year I think I’ll dump them and probably will. It’s just been laziness so far. I pay, they feed my RSS feeds, so in that regard, it works. But yeah, I feel OP.
uallo 4y ago
I've been a non-paying Feedly user since Google Reader shut down. I think their nagging is tolerable. I currently see no point in an upgrade as I don't miss any feature. I've also been a long-time user of Pocket. I would really like them to add feed functionality to their service. It would make it very easy to find new things to read while also having a list of things to read later. That would be a very good value proposition in my opinion, and a reason to pay them.
cnxsoft 4y ago
I'm just using Thunderbird for RSS feeds
Daunk 4y ago
RSS is something I really want to use, but so far I've not been able to find a single piece of software that handles RSS that doesn't suck. I want to add a bunch of RSS feeds, and then have the software notify me - or at least highlight - when related "tags" or words are used, as well as be able to see "everything". But I guess RSS is about to die out anyways, as more and more news sites only allow you to read the first few lines of an article before having to visit their site.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  I started using liferea a few months ago, primarily to track YT channels without YT (so to speak). It can do some version of everything you've mentioned, though is weak on the automatic tag notification thing (though for the feeds I follow, that makes sense, since they are mostly video).
  - Daunk 4y ago
    Cheers, I'll give it a go.
JackFr 4y ago
OP is using a free service. Free service introduces changes which irritate OP. OP stops using service and looks for alternatives. All good. What I (and seemingly many other commenters) take issue with is the tone of the piece. That the OP has been disappointed, that they know better than Feedly management about what features to include and how to market them, that they are owed some sort of a user experience. I suppose the OP is offering this post as guidance and explanation for Feedly management but I can’t imagine that this moves the needle.
sweston4 4y ago
I don't have any of these issues at all? I've a folder called 'main blogs' which is just every feed I follow. Any link I have to Feedly is a link to my 'main blogs' folder which provides a pretty clean interface. I have 0 adds on my 'main blogs' page currently. Perhaps a similar setup would work for others.
PascLeRasc 4y ago
Off topic but while all the RSS people are here - does anyone know of a client or feed that can extract articles from websites that try to stop you from using RSS? Bikepacking.com is an example of this.
divan 4y ago
To contrast other opinions – I think it's a valuable feedback for the company. I also stopped using Feedly when realized that it has become something else than "nice minimalistic rss-reader". I settled with NetNewsWire and super happy with it, really incredible piece of software. I wouldn't mind paying some bucks per month for extra features like proxying sites-without-rss or similar stuff (I need to use third-party solutions to add some important sites to rss reader). So if Feedly wants to build a business around RSS (I couldn't find their vision on the website, so it's a guess), then maybe they just need to listen to those who actually use RSS. I think most of us love RSS for its simplicity, for decentralized nature, for respect to our attention and non-invasiveness into our information consuming patterns. Not much of a business proposition here maybe, but business should be built on top of the real value for users, not the other way around.
- apple4ever 4y ago
  Which ... they do. Just use an app. It's great.
Cupertino95014 4y ago
I use free Feedly multiple times a day, since the demise of Reader. I'm scanning the comments for another free alternative that doesn't suck, but so far I haven't found one. The prompts for "give us money" are infrequent enough that they don't bother me, much. What do you want for nothing, a rrrrrrrubber biscuit? [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYyBZE0kBtE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYyBZE0kBtE
- applefangirl 4y ago
  I've got a couple recommendations. I currently use Net News Wire and News Explorer on the Mac. News Explorer has excelent YouTube integration. If you're into web apps Feedbin is IMO well worth the price.
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  Inoreader
stanislavb 4y ago
Have you tried lenns.io? I have a feeling it will meet your needs.
rryan 4y ago
"I could go pro, but nah" -- I read this and closed the tab. What a whingefest from a free tier user. The Reddit crawling problem is because Reddit rate limits their crawling so they have to prioritize the most popular feeds. What's the problem with linking your account, or making a dedicated feedly throwaway for crawling? Been a pro user since the beginning because I want the service to stick around. It works just as well as it always has and I don't mind that they're adding new features even if they aren't for me. Sheesh.
cogitoergo_some 4y ago
I've been using Feeder on Android, and it's been quite simple and responsive - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsenseapps.feeder.play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense... If there are any other recommendations for apps on Android, those would be welcome too.
- BurntCola 4y ago
  I've been using sparss for about 2 year now, because i can't use feeder(need android >5).
chazeon 4y ago
Feedly is not serious RSS. They don’t have the right taste for the RSS guys of right mind. Switched off after a few months years ago, then become a user for Feedbin. I recently switched to self hosted Miniflux due to their customizable full text scraper and had never been happier.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
Like the author and plenty of commenters have posted, even something as simple as an RSS feed is expensive when hosted among tens of thousands of users. > One of the features is that I will get “new articles up to 10x faster”. What’s that supposed to mean? That I have not been getting new articles straight away when I visit Feedly? This is a perfect example of what we take for granted, multi users RSS feeds have to poll missing pub dates, they don't just fetch the latest posts on a users request. This game where they pull the curtain and you realize how bottle necked you are as a free user, that's the sad game of running a business on these types of services. I've had an idea for an RSS reader for quite some time. One with a layout like HackerNews or early Reddit where all users have their own RSS feed, they can look at and follow other users feed items. there's a main page with posts ranked by number of followers and comments on each post. then of course a personal feed. But considering how much feature creep these services suffer, I don't see how I'd be able to keep it running without some premium payment system, certainly donations can't serve enough.
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
I don't pay Feedly any money now because many years they were raising funds to buy new servers, and offered a premium service in perpetuity to anyone paying $100, which I did on the spot. It is a solid service that has grown to be a bit bigger than I'd love, but it does what it needs to. And if you don't like the 'marketing cruft' you can just block it with your adblocker of choice, not a rocket science.
educaysean 4y ago
This article is music to my ears. As a Feedly user of 6+ years, it's everything that I've felt and more. Thanks for putting into words the frustration that's been building up inside me for a while.
stiltzkin 4y ago
For free solutions there are better alternatives out there not sure the benefits of using free Feedly. As a Pro Feedly user since Google Reader brigade I got to agree to some sentiments about what Feedly offers for pro users, seems the Feedly team has the typical startup problem which is run by marketing people with out of dated ideas. The only feature I have to give props is building your own RSS reader from any website which has worked great on many site I could not work with. But for the price you pay so many features are so really niche that i dont need.
oliwarner 4y ago
Yeah, no sympathy with Erik here. Feedly is —for free— polling RSS feeds for you and giving you centralised, platform agnostic access. They want you to pay for it, and features like an increased polling rate are the soft features they use to tempt you up to a paid platform. Adverts catch some of the users that don't want to pay. I assume you still use Google et al? Why is a search engine or Amazon janking up their SERPs with inline ads better than the odd ad on Feedly? You still use them? I think you're holding Feedly to an unfair standard. Don't get me wrong, a desktop client is great iff that's all you need. Feedly is providing one more feature: network centralisation. I check Feedly from my desktop, my laptop and my phone. I could host something myself but for free (or pennies a day), Feedly keeps everything in sync.
microflash 4y ago
After several years of using Feedly, I stopped using it right when they started showing ads in the feed. My biggest complaint with their Pro offering was that it was extremely unbalanced for the personal use (it still is). As a Pro user, I wanted to cut down the amount of noise I was getting in the feed. But that feature was in Pro+ subscription. I wanted to subscribe to a few Twitter searches; again a Pro+ feature. I wanted to get rid of duplicate posts and it was, you guessed it, a Pro+ feature. Meanwhile, the Pro offering was flooded with things that never mattered to me. In the end, Pro was simply not a good value for me and Pro+ was just too expensive.
m-p-3 4y ago
IMO the lowest ad-free tier for Feedly was too expensive for what I'm doing (~6.00$/month) which is basically agregating news from multiple websites for my own personal use, so I migrated to Inoreader and use the Supporter plan (~1.67$/month), which is enough features for me while remaining ad-free. At that price, I'm okay not having to self-host it to handle the synchronization of articles I've read, liked, etc.
ksec 4y ago
The main two complain: >I have done everything I could to turn off features that I do not need, but this is still relatively cluttered. I do not need to access Leo, Feedly’s AI engine. I do not need to UPGRADE to ‘Pro’. I do not need two separate vertical menus. This makes it sounds like he "did" turn off many features to make it what it shows in the screenshot. But in fact he didn't. Those were default. And when you look at "Leo", and "Upgrade Pro", one being a simple link the other being a top banner that disappear once you scroll down a little. Arguably speaking the only "constant" clutter that is there is the thin vertical menus. That is it! >Recently, Feedly also started showing me pop-ups in case I want to track ’emerging exploits across the Web with Feedly’s AI Engine’ and to ‘research critical vulnerabilities with the new CVE Intelligence Card’, whatever that is. You know, those pop up aren't even Ads. They are new feature notifications. Which means it rarely happens. But the author made it as if it was a daily annoyance. The new generation of programmers who believes everything should be free and open source, preferably AGPL 3.0 to stop companies using GPL 2.0 loopholes, or worse licenses like MIT or BSD which are now considered as "harmful" because they help "evil for profit making companies". All while asking for $200K as a new developers joining right out of college.
akelly 4y ago
I've been looking for a reader the last couple days and Feedly actually seems the best option. Most RSS readers don't allow you to save articles for later and put them in your feed. Pocket and Instapaper do this but require you to subscribe to RSS through IFTT or Zapier which I tried and seem very cumbersome. How is this not a native feature? Pocket and Instapaper allow you to subscribe to email newsletters, Feedly only offers this on their $8/mo plan. I would subscribe to Feedly except their desktop Firefox and Chrome extensions for saving a page for later are both broken! On mobile it works except ~10% of articles it says it cannot parse. Just put a link in my feed then! Anyone have another option that supports RSS, save-for-later, and email? Edit: Wallabag does RSS and save-for-later but not email newsletters Instapaper can send articles to your Kindle which is intriguing Figured out how to configure Zapier, it's not too cumbersome, so much better than IFTT.

189 points by erikgahner 4y ago

So you liked Feedly for almost 10 years, but never bothered to support them financially. And now you complain that they go the extra mile trying to earn money?

motoxpro 4y ago
Exactly. It's so comical. You were never going to support them making their software, never going to upgrade, never going to provide any value to them in anyway even though they provided value to you for 10 years. Seems like this is a good thing for feedly.
- aflag 4y ago
  The author acknowledged that though. He seemed to even had considered buying it, but thought it was not worth it. He eventually settled on something simple and free. It doesn't surprise me that running a simple RSS feed tool is not profitable.
  - simonw 4y ago
    There is very little simple about running an RSS aggregator, especially at scale.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - wahnfrieden 4y ago
      I run one at scale, it doesn’t need to be done in a complicated way
      - wahnfrieden 4y ago
        What I’m saying is by running so many heavy services in the backend, relying on a series of API integrations to provide service and taking custody of swaths of sometimes sensitive user data, they make their own problems
    - aflag 4y ago
      The user doesn't really care about the scale, though. There are chrome plugins, local apps, etc. With dropbox and other similar tools, you can sync across devices and keep configuration stored in the cloud without much hassle. I'm not saying that what feedly was doing was trivial. I'm sure it was expensive and required many developers, designers, etc. However, that doesn't mean that all the effort is necessarily important for the end user.
  - motoxpro 4y ago
    That's 100% reasonable. What's not reasonable is spending time to write a blog post in a tone that makes it seem like the product "is bad". The may not like it but the author wasn't a customer. It's the classic "I would buy it/pay for it if it only had XYZ or did/didn't do ABC." When in reality they were never going to pay for it, they just wanted something simple and free, which is 100% fine.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  for apparently nonsense features. this isn’t a patronage model, it’s a product (and the free tier is not what’s being sold)
  - motoxpro 4y ago
    That was my point. They are not a charity, they are a business. It's not their job to build features for people who have been using the service for 10 year with no intention to upgrade. This person wants a simple free rss reader, all good.
    - wahnfrieden 4y ago
      (misread your tone completely)

pndy 4y ago

I've left Feedly at the first sight of premium options few years ago - I wanted to try something new and it worked for a while. But RSS reader in bookmarks (livemarks as Mozilla once called these) is and tbh always was enough for me. Foxish live RSS does job nicely in Vivaldi.

ismaildonmez 4y ago

https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/ is still the best thing after Google Reader.

radiosnob 4y ago
I rarely ever pay for services on the web. But I will pay for theoldreader. My mind is getting foggy with age, but I think it does everything that Google Reader did, and not much more. The perfect drop-in replacement.
martini333 4y ago
Ugly UI.
- ismaildonmez 4y ago
  So was Google Reader, and it worked fine. That's the whole point.
  - Gualdrapo 4y ago
    Google Reader's UI wasn't that bad imho.
vanderZwan 4y ago
I tried it when they started, it was a sluggish mess that also did not use the browser cache correctly. Maybe I noticed because I had thousands of RSS feeds, I dunno. Granted, that was a decade ago so I hope they improved it since. I stick to https://newsblur.com/ https://newsblur.com/. It has it's quirks but is way, way faster (two days ago a redesign came out that makes it so fast I feel like I'm using the old Google Reader again)
- stereoradonc 4y ago
  I read about their redesign today. I was with them for about 5+ years but then eventually shifted to Inoreader.

dafi70 4y ago

I agree with you about useless PRO features. I loved the 'Mute filters' feature, but they ruined it forcing to use Leo, expressions like "title:HackerNews" are no longer available and LEO is less useful than a simple search by keyword but... there is a "but", I use Feedly APIs and I love them, I developed apps for myself to aggregate and quickly find informations starting from the feeds, using Feedly is so easy, so I continue to pay for a really small subset of features only to be able to extract info from my RSS feeds

smitty1e 4y ago

I'm torn between the love of Free Stuff and the understanding that even Free Stuff costs money.

lbriner 4y ago
It's not even a choice between free and not-free, sometimes you would be happy to pay but then the tool becomes bloatware. As the OP said, why do you need two vertical menus for an RSS reader? Why not hide the advanced stuff under an advanced menu or allow customising what is and isn't visible? Plenty of apps/sites become popular on a strong core USP which people want and then add a tonne of cruft as they pretend they are adding value, when in many cases it is just noise that only a few people want/use but everyone else has to suffer the UX changes along the way.

karolist 4y ago

For many years I'm using ReadKit for Mac and couldn't be happier. Paid once in like 2014 and the app is still getting updates plus I get to my content without third parties. Why use a web service for something that doesn't need a backend to function?

hestefisk 4y ago

NetNewsWire user here. It’s very good. Would love one running on Linux natively.

shimmeringleaf 4y ago
Seconded, it would be lovely to have cross platform. Simple and just works without fuss. Now, if only more websites would have RSS feeds these days.. it's been a steady decline.
- timbit42 4y ago
  QuiteRSS. It even runs on OS/2.
thombles 4y ago
The closest equivalents I’ve found on other platforms are Akregator (Linux/KDE) and QuiteRSS (Win).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

andyjohnson0 4y ago

I dont understqnd this attitude. I use feedly and like the author of tfa I don't pay them any money, so I ignore the junk. This is the price you have to pay when you get something for free. I have a lot of sympathy for feedly: it seems like a really hard thing to get people to pay for. What does the author think feedly should do with its free tier? Before feedly I self hosted TinyTinyRss for a while (kind of slow) and before that Google Reader. And before that Newsblur. I never paid for any of them and now I have more than enough paid subscriptions for stuff. Reading rss feeds just doesn't make it over the line of things I'd be willing to pay for. Edit: I pay £10/month for Adobe Creative Cloud and get Photoshop, Lightroom, XD, Illustrator, etc. I pay ~£8/month for Office 365 and get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. All massively rich and powerful tools. Why does feedly imagine I would want to pay £5/month to read rss feeds?

tribby 4y ago
> I ignore the junk. This is the price you have to pay when you get something for free. clearly it isn’t, or the author wouldn’t have been able to move to a free alternative without any junk to ignore.
- andyjohnson0 4y ago
  I probably didn't express myself sufficiently clearly. I'm pleased that the author has moved from a Web app to local, open source apps. Definitely a good move, particularly on mobile. What I don't get is going to the effort of writing a blog post about the annoyance of using the free tier of a service provided by a commercial business. That tier is there to let people try the service. It's not surprising that the experience isn't friction-free: it's not meant to be.
  - Adraghast 4y ago
    > It's not surprising that the experience isn't friction-free: it's not meant to be. This is an argument for the intentional creation of bad software.

kken 4y ago

NewsBlur is pretty good and does exactly what it is intended for.

UrgentOpinion 4y ago

One of the most useful features of Feedly for me was that you could export full articles with highlights as PDFs. Yet to find another RSS reader that can do this - am currently using Inoreader's highlighting features.

longrod 4y ago

Going through the article I realized this attitude is what eventually kills some really good software. If a software does what you expect it to do and does it well but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing purposes...is that really so bad? Live and let live, I say. Not everyone is running a charity and Feedly is nowhere even near the top of the list of software ripping off their users or selling their data to make money. What the author labels as "cluttered" is really not that cluttered at all. It looks much better than an completely empty list in the alternative they prefer. But that's just UI. I am not saying don't move to another alternative. I am just saying that the reasons the author is calling Feedly out for are unjustified and don't really make sense.

PainfullyNormal 4y ago
> but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing purposes...is that really so bad? If you have two viable options where one is a profound annoyance to you and one isn't, why wouldn't you choose the second option?
- applefangirl 4y ago
  True, and in the case of the Mac you've got a lot of good options with different design choices.
hamdouni 4y ago
> that the reasons the author is calling Feedly out for are unjustified and don't really make sense. Well, at least it is justified and make sense for the author.
prepend 4y ago
> is that really so bad? I think in many situations, yes. I grew up with shareware and so I know that prompts are necessary to drive income. What the prompts in this article are so bad at is that they are perpetual. Is it really necessary to nag a user over and over for something they don’t want and declined? That is probably not going to work in the long run as people associate a bad experience with the product. Figure out a better way to get income that doesn’t involve perpetually wasting a user’s time and frustrating them.

jollins 4y ago

This writer is really entitled. It is a free tier for a service that costs money to host and maintain. Of course there are upgrade prompts. I use Feedly (free) as a hosting service, and Reeder or one of the other many great RSS client apps as the frontend to it, so I don’t have to see the feedly interface.But the Feedly API I use constantly and it is extremely solid. That’s part of the greatness of RSS services. If the service’s UI bothers you, you don’t have to use it.

lbriner 4y ago
I think that is a bit unfair. Many of us have used something that was originally a certain way and worked and we have let it get embedded and useful at which point it becomes more and more complicated, maybe the upgrade prompts become much more prominent and we feel let down by something that doesn't actually solve the problem any more. I don't know Feedly's history and whether it was originally Open Source or not but plenty of people decide their popular FOSS tool could be paid-for, at which point it is common to disenfranchise the people who made it popular in the first-place.
- jzb 4y ago
  If you have a problem solved by software, pay for it. They’re not a charity. If you’re just using without giving back you have zero standing to feel let down. Feedly is a SaaS, not a foss project. They have bills to pay.
  - hamdouni 4y ago
    Foss project also have bills to pay.
    - Semiapies 4y ago
      People regularly act like asses to them without contributing a cent, either.
prepend 4y ago

elcapitan 4y ago

I left Feedly for the same reason a while ago. I think there is a trend of "editorialization" of all kinds of apps that tries to sell new features and "experiences" to users instead of focusing on the core ideas, which I find really annoying. Plus the Feedly UI itself is annoying and doesn't give me a simple mailbox-like view like normal RSS readers. The solution I went with is native RSS readers (like the author), but backed by an Open Reader server (The Old Reader in my case, but there are others) for syncing between devices. On the Mac, Vienna as a client is quite nice.

Semaphor 4y ago

> I started using it because of its simplicity and minimalism. That is so weird to me. I tried pretty much everything there was back then (eventually settled on Newsblur only to switch to self-hosted TT-RSS after they raised prices when I already barely got any use out of their features) and Feedly always seemed like one of the most bloated/featureful (pick your choice here :D) options there was.

frenkel 4y ago

Feedbin is what the author wants. It is even open source.

edvinasbartkus 4y ago
second that! and NetNewsWire is a great companion to Feedbin when you want native experience on iPad/iPhone/Mac.

scarface74 4y ago

I deleted Feedly from my phone a long time ago for some reason. I can’t remember why. It wasn’t because I didn’t like it. I redownloaded it a few weeks ago and it was a shit show. I looked for other alternatives and I found NetNewsWire. It has a long history of first being a commercial product by an indy Mac dev. He sold it to another company, reacquired the rights, updated it and now it’s free and open source for the Mac and iOS. It’s clean and does the basics.

naugtur 4y ago

If you liked it before all the monetization strategies, maybe should have paid for it to keep it sustainable that way?

prepend 4y ago
I don’t think so. It would just be nagging for other things. I think this is a design philosophy by Feedly and paying just pushes the problem down the road. I pay for creative cloud and there’s so many ads and pitches for new products. I long for the days where I pirated ps6 and never had any ads (or paid for it too).
jacurtis 4y ago
I'm am a huge proponent for paying for good software to support developers and creators. HOWEVER, I think you sentiment is wrong here. You _should_ support creators that are doing things you like so that they keep doing those things you like. But it doesn't make sense to pay creators that are doing think you don't like. The fact that you start paying them is taken as confirmation that you are enjoying the product. Imagine if we all hated Feedly's product but banded together to have everyone subscribe to Feedly to support them. They would see that userbase as confirmation to keep doing what they are doing, building shitty software. They aren't going to about face their product strategy because you are paying them $6 a month now. So instead what we should all do is find creators that are doing RSS readers justice and support THOSE creators. For example, I switched from Feedly to Feedbin. I was a free user at Feedly and never wanted to upgrade because, like the author of the article said, it was bloated and unejoyable and the premium features weren't things I needed. So instead I found a tool that is everything I wanted, which happened to be FeedBin. I supported them and am paying them $5 per month for them to continue their efforts because they are building the software the way I want RSS Readers to be. So I would like to see them survive and thats what my paid subscription provides. Let's encourage good products. No reason to throw good money at bad products. Find the good ones and support those.

lf-non 4y ago

I use a self-hosted yarr [1] instance for rss. It is really minimal and very easy to run (self contained native binary). [1] https://github.com/nkanaev/yarr https://github.com/nkanaev/yarr

stereoradonc 4y ago

Try Inoreader. Besides a bevy of rich feature set, Inoreader has sales ONLY on Black Friday, and they usually extend the service by an additional 6 months if you pay yearly. It lacks Feedly's stupid UI. It's functional, fast, and I can zip through hundreds of feeds in no time. My favourite is the IFTTT and Readwise integration baked in. Alternatively, you can have the complete experience in Vivaldi itself. It comes with the RSS reader and a mail client. Absolute DOPE! Inoreader allows you to keep track of specific keywords and automatically follow the RSS feeds. I am waiting for a better UI around Vivaldi's RSS reader, and will reevaluate my RSS reader needs close to the end of the subscription period.

369548684892826 4y ago
And the ad-free tier is much better value than Feedly, like one quarter of the price even if you don't do the Black Friday thing.
roldie 4y ago
Another shoutout for Inoreader. Been using it for years. The free tier is great, but the paid tier is seriously one of the best investments I've ever made
- stereoradonc 4y ago
  Completely agree! It's an investment in serious reading. I track over 600+ feeds (and counting) and Inoreader helps me to speed up the process.
bscphil 4y ago
I've recommended Inoreader multiple times on this site before, but unfortunately the service has gotten worse over the years by a couple of metrics. Most of the worthwhile features are now gated behind the most expensive plan, rather than being properly staggered. I subscribe to so few feeds I could literally use the free (ad-supported) plan, and I use none of the advanced features at all except filters. If you want to filter a single feed, you have to buy the most expensive plan they sell. That's crazy! Regardless, I have happily supported them for years. I'm not the sort of user that others are complaining about in this thread that wants everything for free. That's about to change too though. Since the site began, the plan I've been on has cost $30 a year, which is acceptable for the value I get out of it. I was able to extend the plan for multiple years at $18/yr thanks to Black Friday and Christmas sales. Now, however, they're changing things around, and want me to resubscribe to keep the features I use at $90/yr (or $120 if you pay monthly). I'm not a software engineer making six figures. I can't afford to throw $100 at every service I use like this. A $30 -> $90 price increase is just enormous. Again, I want to pay for the features I use, but because they've failed to provide any kind of pricing ramp, they'll soon get nothing from me.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

Do you think there's an opportunity for a new RSS reader to emerge? And be financially successful, without the BS of ads, etc?

criddell 4y ago
No.
cosmiccatnap 4y ago
An open source RSS reader could easily be someone's weekend project...
- Semiapies 4y ago
  And probably has been many times, given how many there are.

poisonborz 4y ago

You can use Feedly simply as a cloud service to store your RSS subscriptions. There's a number of good clients that use it and display a simple feed that you want. For Android, there is FeedMe.

lawgimenez 4y ago

I have been using Reeder for years now, I use it also for read it later integrated with Pocket. I love the latest update because I get to set the fonts to San Francisco Rounded which is one of my favorite fonts.

butz 4y ago

Miniflux works great for me. Took a few months to get used to minimal layout, but it has everything that I need to read RSS feeds. I'm using paid hosted version, but there is an open source version which can be self-hosted.

Rudism 4y ago
Second this. I've been self-hosting Miniflux for years and love it. It's dead simple to run (a single executable daemon or docker container that you can run behind a reverse proxy) and it sounds like exactly what the author of this article is looking for--no frills RSS reader with a very minimalist interface.

PaulKeeble 4y ago

FreshRSS (https://freshrss.org/ https://freshrss.org/) is self hosted and its what I have been using for years. There are a variety of RSS web readers you can deploy to a home server or NAS or even just a raspberry pi stuck in the corner they aren't very resource intensive as programs and the docker images make them really easy to deploy.

Macha 4y ago
Been using freshrss and mostly happy with it. The UI is a little clunky but the biggest wishlist item is if they let me use article dates from feeds rather than fetch dates everywhere

boboche 4y ago

Same path here, google, feedly, ragequit feedly due to bloat/jirafication, now inoreader. Up to 150 feeds supported, works awesome on ipad and web.

madsbuch 4y ago

Growth vs. value, development vs. maintenance, innovation vs. operations. It really seems like a lot of projects should embrace the the path of becoming a stable product: Charging 10 USD a year, assigning a single person to a comfy job of maintaining the app without adding new features. Just maintaining infrastructure, updating packages, and doing the occasional exchange of stack when old technologies are deprecated... Why doesn't that happen more?

wahnfrieden 4y ago
Investors looking for returns What you’re describing is a kind of anti growth public service. Sounds nice!
Semiapies 4y ago
Most people don't actually want to pay for things.

t6jvcereio 4y ago

If you like simplistic, why not newsboat? I bet you it's faster than any POS web app https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/

jefftk 4y ago

> One of the features is that I will get “new articles up to 10x faster”. What’s that supposed to mean? That I have not been getting new articles straight away when I visit Feedly? One of the features of Pro is that they'll pull the feeds you're subscribed to at a higher frequency. I think this is an example of doing freemium well!

Gualdrapo 4y ago
Was going to mention this. For example, I see HN posts via Feedly. But after each fetch for "new" articles, the most recent ones it shows me from HN are from an hour ago at least. For some other websites it pulls their "most recent" content from the previous day.

dwighttk 4y ago

Huh. I use Feedly but access it through Reeder and don’t seem to have many troubles. Every once in a while I think of unsubscribing to a feed and it is a bit of an adventure, but that is my only complaint.

b-lee 4y ago
BTW I didn't understand the need for connecting Feedly to reader. Why didn't you simply import the OPML from Feedly to Reeder?
- dwighttk 4y ago
  I set it up 9 years ago and OPML import was not made obvious to me. Or possibly: I think I was using NetNewsWire on desktop or something when I set it up, so maybe it was obvious but I wanted read-syncing between different platforms.

sascha_sl 4y ago

Feedly has put a lot more effort into being a research tool, probably mostly for marketing in the past, well, years. Of course it clashes with being a simple RSS reader for the author. This is just mismatched expectations, not Feedly getting worse.

t6jvcereio 4y ago

Is it known why Google killed reader? Certainly it wasn't lack of traction.

timbit42 4y ago
They're a business. I would presume they weren't able to make enough, or perhaps any, profit off of it.

otsaloma 4y ago

The author complains he couldn't add a Reddit RSS feed. I once looked into this. It was already a few years ago, but I guess it hasn't changed. The problem is that updating all Reddit feeds of all Feedly users goes way above Reddit's API call rate limits. So, it's probably simply not possible in a centralized free service. The problem isn't so much Feedly, but the various sites' (not only Reddit) ignorance or hostility towards RSS that results in these kinds of implementations.

Uupis 4y ago
reddit provides RSS feeds: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss
- Macha 4y ago
  The parent poster even acknowledged this. The point is the feed is rate limited. And you need one call per unique subreddit. And Feedly's users collectively have more unique subreddits than the Reddit rate limit.
  - pavel_lishin 4y ago
    Strange; I can subscribe to user rss feeds in Newsblur. I'm guessing Newsblur somehow rotates through all the users' collective RSS feeds in some manner to not trip the rate limit, which might explain why new posts don't show up immediately. (Which is fine for me as a user; most of the reddit RSS feeds I subscribe to, I don't need to see immediately!)
  - Uupis 4y ago
    Ah, my bad. The reference to API made me think they're replicating RSS via the reddit API. I was not aware that RSS feeds are so rate-limited, too. More on the subject, for anyone curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/4u9tj8/rss_feeds_update_interval_skyrocketed_to_180/ https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/4u9tj8/rss_feeds_upda...

sys_64738 4y ago

I moved to InoReader after the Google Reader cull and must say it’s been pretty consistent in quality. I usually pick up a good deal around Thanksgiving.

htk 4y ago

For those in the Apple ecosystem I recommend NetNewsWire. It can sync with iCloud without needing any extra services. I use it on my Macs, iPads and iPhone. (I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy user)

r2222 4y ago

I’ve been very happy with https://feedbin.com https://feedbin.com It’s a paid RSS syncing service and web app too, costs $5 per month, I use it with Reeder (and NetNewsWire etc). It doesn’t have any social cruft or AI assistants or ML companions. I was also a Feedly user when I decided to try Feedbin, and I immediately noticed how much faster fetching the feeds was on Feedbin. I also like to have my email newsletters in same place (forward them to a Feedbin-provided email address), and I can have filters to mark things like sponsored posts and podcast show notes as read automatically, basically like mute filters. Feedly premium tier costs pretty much the same, and I wonder how well it would stack against Feedbin. There’s also Inoreader which I think offers pretty similar feature set for a pretty similar price. Feedly free tier is excellent, and you can work around many of its shortcomings by using an RSS reader app. For example, Feedly free doesn’t offer full text articles, but I can extract the full text with Reeder/NetNewsWire/etc on the client-side. If you really don’t care about speed, mute filters, or reading newsletters in your RSS reader, then Feedly free tier is already more than enough.

Semiapies 4y ago
Feedbin is pretty great. I was particularly glad it was paid, early on, because that made it more likely to actually stay around.
jacurtis 4y ago
I switched from Feedly to FeedBin recently for all the same reasons and noticed all the same things you highlighted here. I don't mind the nominal fee of $5/mo since it is a delightful experience that is powerful, fast, and clean. They have added features that I think we need, without the Bloat. Ironically Feedly is only $1 more per month, but I was never enticed to upgrade because the experience was really just awful. FeedBin also gives access to a solid API for you to manage your feeds and supports all the open standards as well to easily import/export them. I think the takeaway for product owners is that sometimes you need to really zoom out and look at your product. I used Feedly for 8-9 years as a free user and never wanted to upgrade. I was willing to for the right product, but never did. Once I found a simpler product (FeedBin) that met my needs, I immediately paid. Feedly has shoved ads and half-assed new features into their product for almost a decade trying to get their influx of Google Reader subscribers to upgrade. But no one was compelled to. It eventually pissed off free users enough that they switch to other paid alternatives. That's pretty sad honestly.

protonbob 4y ago

Is there an easy to use self hosted solution for this?

hairofadog 4y ago
If you’re on a Mac or iOS you can use Reeder, which syncs to iCloud and eliminates the need for any other cloud service. I think other RSS apps may do the same.
- astrostl 4y ago
  Reeder (et al.) + iCloud sync was a game-changer for me too.

voisin 4y ago

My biggest pet peeve with Feedly is that it doesn’t allow for filtering by keyword (which could be done on-device to save server resources if that’s a concern) without a monthly subscription that includes tons of things I don’t care about, like this AI thing and whatnot. I’d even pay a one time fee for this right. But forcing users to pay for something so simple in perpetuity seems ridiculous.

livelace 4y ago

Cannot stay away, because I'm a guy who used Google Reader and moved all my RSS stuff 1-2 years before Google Reader was finally closed. I tried to use Feedly and other tools, but at that time I decided to use rss2email. Right now I have my own tool (https://github.com/livelace/gosquito https://github.com/livelace/gosquito) for data gathering from different sources. One way to use it - just put news into mail system (I'm Zimbra user - https://paste.pics/7f48e9ca655de96f2160ecbff474bbca https://paste.pics/7f48e9ca655de96f2160ecbff474bbca, and I use internal search engine heavily). I don't depend on external services and can process data as I want.

almog 4y ago

After going through Google Reader, Feedly, Newsblur and QuiteRSS, I've finally settled on Newsboat, as I can really customize it to my needs, debug it and even integrate custom html to rss generators. For example, ebay has recently recently stopped supporting RSS through search results (an '_rss=1' query string was supported for over 10 years), and while there are some workaround such as using different search endpoint where the RSS has not been deprecated yet, with Newsboat, I was able to write a custom filter to extract RSS with just few lines of code: https://github.com/almog/newsboat-ebay2rss-filter https://github.com/almog/newsboat-ebay2rss-filter

pHollda 4y ago

daggersandscars 4y ago

If you're looking for a cross-Apple-ecosystem reader, News Explorer provides MacOS, iOS, and iPadOS apps and uses iCloud to sync. No affiliation, just like using it. If you're only following feeds on MacOS, NetNewsWire is also great.

kenada 4y ago
NetNewsWire has had an iOS version for a while now.

benrapscallion 4y ago

I pay for NewsBlur and have been doing so for years. It is an underappreciated, excellent, fully-featured, indie RSS feed reader with support for twitter and youtube etc. It can extract full text from feeds. It can both receive emails (newsletters) and send emails (when a feed updates). They have an excellent free tier. I have tried every other competitor and no one comes close.

nXqd 4y ago

Reading through the article, Feedly might just have a classic, fast version without any new features and charge users for it. And those who wants new fancy things can enjoy the fancy version. And I believe, there are many users who just want fast and simple software these days, and early version of feedly was a great example.

keithnz 4y ago

I find feedly works really great. I'm on the free tier, my UI is relatively uncluttered, they introduce new things from time to time, but mostly it's the same as when I first started when google reader shutdown. I get this author doesn't like it, but it all seems a bit overly dramatic for a few feeds.

pretdl 4y ago

gaul 4y ago

https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/ is a free software, self-hosted alternative and https://ttrss.info/ https://ttrss.info/ is a paid hosted offering.

cosmiccatnap 4y ago

Have we really fallen this low? How are there so many people in this comment section defending feedly while berating the author for what I would consider a level headed and fair assessment of the state of it. As someone hunting constantly for a reader as simple as Google reader and feedly use to be it all makes perfect sense and is equally frustrating to me. It's an RSS reader that no longer accepts many RSS feeds, that is a more than valid criticism and we should be allowed to be picky about that without being berated by our fellow HN readers.

Macha 4y ago
HN readers generally put themselves into the vendor's shoes and therefore have a hard time accepting criticism of something the vendor does at their own interest at the expense of the user's.

thrdbndndn 4y ago

I've tried all the free services listed in this thread, and feedly is the best for me. I'd admit I never really like it's UI, but it's usable. And it didn't change much all these years. Nowadays, I meanly just use the extension "Feedly Notifier" [1] to read (or open directly) articles in my browser, so I barely open feedly.com anymore. I highly recommend it. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/feedly-notifier/egikgfbhipinieabdmcpigejkaomgjgb?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/feedly-notifier/eg...

browningstreet 4y ago

I pay for Feedly, and have since the beginning, but I don’t love it. Their search function has severe usability issues, which I’ve emailed them, and their enhanced features are stupid and useless. I don’t like Feedly, and use Unread on the iPhone to read the feeds. They are like the Evernote of today. Every year I think I’ll dump them and probably will. It’s just been laziness so far. I pay, they feed my RSS feeds, so in that regard, it works. But yeah, I feel OP.

uallo 4y ago

I've been a non-paying Feedly user since Google Reader shut down. I think their nagging is tolerable. I currently see no point in an upgrade as I don't miss any feature. I've also been a long-time user of Pocket. I would really like them to add feed functionality to their service. It would make it very easy to find new things to read while also having a list of things to read later. That would be a very good value proposition in my opinion, and a reason to pay them.

cnxsoft 4y ago

I'm just using Thunderbird for RSS feeds

Daunk 4y ago

RSS is something I really want to use, but so far I've not been able to find a single piece of software that handles RSS that doesn't suck. I want to add a bunch of RSS feeds, and then have the software notify me - or at least highlight - when related "tags" or words are used, as well as be able to see "everything". But I guess RSS is about to die out anyways, as more and more news sites only allow you to read the first few lines of an article before having to visit their site.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
I started using liferea a few months ago, primarily to track YT channels without YT (so to speak). It can do some version of everything you've mentioned, though is weak on the automatic tag notification thing (though for the feeds I follow, that makes sense, since they are mostly video).
- Daunk 4y ago
  Cheers, I'll give it a go.

JackFr 4y ago

OP is using a free service. Free service introduces changes which irritate OP. OP stops using service and looks for alternatives. All good. What I (and seemingly many other commenters) take issue with is the tone of the piece. That the OP has been disappointed, that they know better than Feedly management about what features to include and how to market them, that they are owed some sort of a user experience. I suppose the OP is offering this post as guidance and explanation for Feedly management but I can’t imagine that this moves the needle.

sweston4 4y ago

I don't have any of these issues at all? I've a folder called 'main blogs' which is just every feed I follow. Any link I have to Feedly is a link to my 'main blogs' folder which provides a pretty clean interface. I have 0 adds on my 'main blogs' page currently. Perhaps a similar setup would work for others.

PascLeRasc 4y ago

Off topic but while all the RSS people are here - does anyone know of a client or feed that can extract articles from websites that try to stop you from using RSS? Bikepacking.com is an example of this.

divan 4y ago

To contrast other opinions – I think it's a valuable feedback for the company. I also stopped using Feedly when realized that it has become something else than "nice minimalistic rss-reader". I settled with NetNewsWire and super happy with it, really incredible piece of software. I wouldn't mind paying some bucks per month for extra features like proxying sites-without-rss or similar stuff (I need to use third-party solutions to add some important sites to rss reader). So if Feedly wants to build a business around RSS (I couldn't find their vision on the website, so it's a guess), then maybe they just need to listen to those who actually use RSS. I think most of us love RSS for its simplicity, for decentralized nature, for respect to our attention and non-invasiveness into our information consuming patterns. Not much of a business proposition here maybe, but business should be built on top of the real value for users, not the other way around.

apple4ever 4y ago
Which ... they do. Just use an app. It's great.

Cupertino95014 4y ago

I use free Feedly multiple times a day, since the demise of Reader. I'm scanning the comments for another free alternative that doesn't suck, but so far I haven't found one. The prompts for "give us money" are infrequent enough that they don't bother me, much. What do you want for nothing, a rrrrrrrubber biscuit? [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYyBZE0kBtE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYyBZE0kBtE

applefangirl 4y ago
I've got a couple recommendations. I currently use Net News Wire and News Explorer on the Mac. News Explorer has excelent YouTube integration. If you're into web apps Feedbin is IMO well worth the price.
nickthegreek 4y ago
Inoreader

stanislavb 4y ago

Have you tried lenns.io? I have a feeling it will meet your needs.

rryan 4y ago

"I could go pro, but nah" -- I read this and closed the tab. What a whingefest from a free tier user. The Reddit crawling problem is because Reddit rate limits their crawling so they have to prioritize the most popular feeds. What's the problem with linking your account, or making a dedicated feedly throwaway for crawling? Been a pro user since the beginning because I want the service to stick around. It works just as well as it always has and I don't mind that they're adding new features even if they aren't for me. Sheesh.

cogitoergo_some 4y ago

I've been using Feeder on Android, and it's been quite simple and responsive - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsenseapps.feeder.play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense... If there are any other recommendations for apps on Android, those would be welcome too.

BurntCola 4y ago
I've been using sparss for about 2 year now, because i can't use feeder(need android >5).

chazeon 4y ago

Feedly is not serious RSS. They don’t have the right taste for the RSS guys of right mind. Switched off after a few months years ago, then become a user for Feedbin. I recently switched to self hosted Miniflux due to their customizable full text scraper and had never been happier.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

Like the author and plenty of commenters have posted, even something as simple as an RSS feed is expensive when hosted among tens of thousands of users. > One of the features is that I will get “new articles up to 10x faster”. What’s that supposed to mean? That I have not been getting new articles straight away when I visit Feedly? This is a perfect example of what we take for granted, multi users RSS feeds have to poll missing pub dates, they don't just fetch the latest posts on a users request. This game where they pull the curtain and you realize how bottle necked you are as a free user, that's the sad game of running a business on these types of services. I've had an idea for an RSS reader for quite some time. One with a layout like HackerNews or early Reddit where all users have their own RSS feed, they can look at and follow other users feed items. there's a main page with posts ranked by number of followers and comments on each post. then of course a personal feed. But considering how much feature creep these services suffer, I don't see how I'd be able to keep it running without some premium payment system, certainly donations can't serve enough.

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago

I don't pay Feedly any money now because many years they were raising funds to buy new servers, and offered a premium service in perpetuity to anyone paying $100, which I did on the spot. It is a solid service that has grown to be a bit bigger than I'd love, but it does what it needs to. And if you don't like the 'marketing cruft' you can just block it with your adblocker of choice, not a rocket science.

educaysean 4y ago

This article is music to my ears. As a Feedly user of 6+ years, it's everything that I've felt and more. Thanks for putting into words the frustration that's been building up inside me for a while.

stiltzkin 4y ago

For free solutions there are better alternatives out there not sure the benefits of using free Feedly. As a Pro Feedly user since Google Reader brigade I got to agree to some sentiments about what Feedly offers for pro users, seems the Feedly team has the typical startup problem which is run by marketing people with out of dated ideas. The only feature I have to give props is building your own RSS reader from any website which has worked great on many site I could not work with. But for the price you pay so many features are so really niche that i dont need.

oliwarner 4y ago

Yeah, no sympathy with Erik here. Feedly is —for free— polling RSS feeds for you and giving you centralised, platform agnostic access. They want you to pay for it, and features like an increased polling rate are the soft features they use to tempt you up to a paid platform. Adverts catch some of the users that don't want to pay. I assume you still use Google et al? Why is a search engine or Amazon janking up their SERPs with inline ads better than the odd ad on Feedly? You still use them? I think you're holding Feedly to an unfair standard. Don't get me wrong, a desktop client is great iff that's all you need. Feedly is providing one more feature: network centralisation. I check Feedly from my desktop, my laptop and my phone. I could host something myself but for free (or pennies a day), Feedly keeps everything in sync.

microflash 4y ago

After several years of using Feedly, I stopped using it right when they started showing ads in the feed. My biggest complaint with their Pro offering was that it was extremely unbalanced for the personal use (it still is). As a Pro user, I wanted to cut down the amount of noise I was getting in the feed. But that feature was in Pro+ subscription. I wanted to subscribe to a few Twitter searches; again a Pro+ feature. I wanted to get rid of duplicate posts and it was, you guessed it, a Pro+ feature. Meanwhile, the Pro offering was flooded with things that never mattered to me. In the end, Pro was simply not a good value for me and Pro+ was just too expensive.

m-p-3 4y ago

IMO the lowest ad-free tier for Feedly was too expensive for what I'm doing (~6.00$/month) which is basically agregating news from multiple websites for my own personal use, so I migrated to Inoreader and use the Supporter plan (~1.67$/month), which is enough features for me while remaining ad-free. At that price, I'm okay not having to self-host it to handle the synchronization of articles I've read, liked, etc.

ksec 4y ago

The main two complain: >I have done everything I could to turn off features that I do not need, but this is still relatively cluttered. I do not need to access Leo, Feedly’s AI engine. I do not need to UPGRADE to ‘Pro’. I do not need two separate vertical menus. This makes it sounds like he "did" turn off many features to make it what it shows in the screenshot. But in fact he didn't. Those were default. And when you look at "Leo", and "Upgrade Pro", one being a simple link the other being a top banner that disappear once you scroll down a little. Arguably speaking the only "constant" clutter that is there is the thin vertical menus. That is it! >Recently, Feedly also started showing me pop-ups in case I want to track ’emerging exploits across the Web with Feedly’s AI Engine’ and to ‘research critical vulnerabilities with the new CVE Intelligence Card’, whatever that is. You know, those pop up aren't even Ads. They are new feature notifications. Which means it rarely happens. But the author made it as if it was a daily annoyance. The new generation of programmers who believes everything should be free and open source, preferably AGPL 3.0 to stop companies using GPL 2.0 loopholes, or worse licenses like MIT or BSD which are now considered as "harmful" because they help "evil for profit making companies". All while asking for $200K as a new developers joining right out of college.

akelly 4y ago

I've been looking for a reader the last couple days and Feedly actually seems the best option. Most RSS readers don't allow you to save articles for later and put them in your feed. Pocket and Instapaper do this but require you to subscribe to RSS through IFTT or Zapier which I tried and seem very cumbersome. How is this not a native feature? Pocket and Instapaper allow you to subscribe to email newsletters, Feedly only offers this on their $8/mo plan. I would subscribe to Feedly except their desktop Firefox and Chrome extensions for saving a page for later are both broken! On mobile it works except ~10% of articles it says it cannot parse. Just put a link in my feed then! Anyone have another option that supports RSS, save-for-later, and email? Edit: Wallabag does RSS and save-for-later but not email newsletters Instapaper can send articles to your Kindle which is intriguing Figured out how to configure Zapier, it's not too cumbersome, so much better than IFTT.