Goodbye, Feedly
erikgahner.dkGoing 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.
RSS is basically impossible to monetize. It's a protocol to access content. Monetizing RSS is like trying to monetize HTTP.
The problem is that companies try to monetize RSS, and the only way of doing so is to provide features that RSS can't offer. AI-curated feeds, integrations with X or Y, nudges to let go of RSS entirely for some applications and instead use whatever integration they've come up with...
Some people may be happy with this. Some people may only care about the information they eventually get, not HOW they get it. But I'm not among those people, and many other people are not.
I personally felt very annoyed by Feedly nagging me on a daily basis to upgrade in order to get features that I didn't need and never asked for.
I feel like being approached every day by a dude who wants to sell me a vaccum cleaner that I don't want. And of course I understand that they also need to make money, but they should also respect those who simply want an RSS reader and are insensitive to all these campaigns.
Thats the reason why I moved from Feedly to a self-hosted Miniflux instance (and Nextcloud News before it). If I host it myself, then I don't have to pay anyone for hosting my feeds, and I'm not supposed to be targeted by marketing campaigns to pull money out of my wallet on a daily basis.
> The problem is that companies try to monetize RSS, and the only way of doing so is to provide features that RSS can't offer.
I don't know if I agree; I pay Newsblur a yearly fee because it's worth it to me having a centralized web-app that I don't have to self-host (and consequently, don't have to worry about paying for, or hitting rate limits, etc.) with a nice UI and a few features like sorting by folder.
Granted, I have no idea how much it costs to run Newsblur; I certainly hope they're at least breaking even. I also don't know if I'm a typical-enough user.
I'm using the Feedly app not paid since Google shut down theirs.
I have no clue what you mean.
Where do they show this daily?
And don't get me wrong, you traided self management against a nag pop up? It's your choice but Feedly still does it with a reasonable offering.
And I actually thinking about going pro to remove all the rumor news shit I don't care and the cve feature sounds nice as well.
Your user account may be old enough to be grandfathered into a lower obnoxiousness setting.
When migrating from Android to iOS 1.5 years ago, I decided to set up a fresh Feedly account linked to the Apple identity instead of the Google identity. My original Feedly account is from circa 2013. As it turned out, I could not set up my feeds in the same way as on the old account because the free tier now caps out at 3 categories (or sections or whatever, the things where you group feeds into). On my old setup, I have 5 or 6 categories, also on the free tier. So I think there's some amount of grandfathering going on.
I pay for Inoreader and really like it. Somewhat ironically, its killer feature for my use case is the ability to ingest emailed content will make emailed content look like any other RSS feed, since lots of scientific journals / sites have stopped using RSS.
That's why the revival of NetNewsWire is a great thing. They don't offer enough settings, but outside of that they're at parity with all the paying services and they're free and open-source.
>RSS is basically impossible to monetize.
It may also be illegal (or at least on shaky grounds) if you happen to make money out of content that is not yours.
When I read threads like these I feel I must be terribly unsophisticated/"un"-picky compared to the average HN users. I have been using Feedly since when Google Reader went down, and I follow ~100 feeds (including HN! I never browse articles through the front page, I let articles with enough upvotes like this come to me via Feedly) in 5-10 reading sessions a day from browser and iOS apps, so I'd say I'm a very active user.
I am on the free tier and nothing ever bothers me, it continues being a wonderful service every day. The ads are fine, I totally understand it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The same is largely true of free products from which I get massive value but HN constantly complains about: Google Search, Reddit, ...
I actually have been a Feedly subscriber for years (since Google reader closed). However I seldom use it anymore. At some point it gave me anxiety bc of the amount of unread articles. I pay for it yearly... I actually think I should unsubscribe
I guess it's a matter of opinion because Feedly's interface looks cluttered to me. It's not a bad offender for a webapp but compared to other feed readers its interface is IMO busy.
Also a matter of opinion but app developers IMO shouldn't use their apps to market. I've already got an email app and a Feed reader. If I want to keep up with you I'll subscribe to your mailing list or follow your feed.
I disable auto-update because I get annoyed when apps tell me about new versions (and I have privacy concerns.) I wont consider using an app that doesn't let me disable auto update. I already have a strategy to keep my software up-to-date that works on my schedule.
I recognize I'm sensitive to these things but that doesn't mean they aren't justified or don't make sense. They just don't make sense * to you *.
Tangential: if updates bother you, you might want to give NetGuard a try (not affiliated). FOSS, though the pro version license costs $5 iirc. It is a great way to make apps behave nicely - even Firefox is too chatty (telemetry & co.) for my taste. Since updates are often from a different domain, you can just block them. How it works is that all the traffic on the phone is routed through a local (just an app on your phone!) VPN where it can be logged and filtered. Brilliant idea.
As a bonus, it is also very satisfying watching apps try to connect to various ad networks and spy agencies^W^W Google unsuccessfully.
I use a similiar app on my Mac. It helps me catch poorly behaving apps so I can remove them.
PiHole is similar to this but self-hosted (and also blocks ads)
NetGuard is on-device, can't get much more 'self-hosted' than that. Can PiHole filter per-app though? I wouldn't have thought so. NG can and it's the main reason I use it.
What does look cluttered to you in Feedly?
Just don't use the web app?
I've been using Feedly since Google Reader shut down and I've visited their site like once every six months.
I use Newsify on iOS and ReadKit on my Mac.
> 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.
They could just have an “ad” screen like the about screen. Encourage users to check it out or leave it open for a time as a source of support for the product.
I’m guessing the most innocuous is just a banner ad of reasonable size that doesn’t detract too much from usable space.
Or, you know, people could pay for their software.
I think I bought a ton of shareware that had innocuous purchase ads (eg, id’s commander keen). The idea isn’t that ads are bad, but that having continuous ads over and over is annoying and unlikely to result in me buying.
Not giving out a service for free is probably the best option.
> 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?
Don’t change things. It’s not hard. Leave things alone. Be consistent.
Marketing? If you pay for it already that’s all the marketing needed. Don’t go trying to suck data from elsewhere with creeper policies to sell the data to creeper brokers.
> Marketing? If you pay for it already that’s all the marketing needed.
I mean, based on what the author said, they're not paying for it. In fact they're annoyed there is a button asking them to pay for it :D
> is that really so bad?
In case of Feedly, yes. I feel like a hamster being tried to be converted. Feedly's free tier doesn't feel like free. It feels like a getaway drug which tries to make you pay for other features.
I have used for a week, then SDF announced availability of their TTRSS instance. As a paying member, I moved there. I am much more happier now.
TTRSS is free and open source. I'm just supporting SDF so they can continue to exist.
> In case of Feedly, yes. I feel like a hamster being tried to be converted.
You are a hamster trying to be converted. That’s the point of the free tier. You could just pay for it and the nagging would stop. You are now paying for TTRSS and have the experience of a paying customer.
Hard to say.
Part of the appeal of advertising in Cosmpolitan or the New York Times is that the readers have qualified themselves by paying for a subscription.
Netflix is playing a dangerous game by letting people pay to turn on ads because the kind of person who values their attention so little to save a few dollars isn’t going to buy anything. The really desirable people to advertise to are the ones who have more money to spend.
My guess is that a person who subscribes to the entry level of a product is more likely to be upsold to something else than a free user is going to even think about paying. (e.g. try watching TV during the daytime and it is depressing to see ads for prescription drugs and Medicare scams and personal injury lawyers, the one thing you might rarely see that people spend their own money on is car dealerships and I guess they need those because I’d nobody bought a car you could never get hit by a car and call William Mattar.)
My guess is that a person who subscribes to the entry level of a product is more likely to be upsold to something else than a free user is going to even think about paying.
I think this is the crucial thing. If you offer a service with what you might call a "livable" or "comfortable" free tier, it will end up used as heavily as you allow by people who will cost you resources indefinitely, but who are far more likely to switch to another free service than to ever pay you a cent. For instance, as terrible as this blogger claims to have found Feedly, he used it for nearly a decade!
Skip the temptation to try to eke out a little money from the free tier (because you probably won't) and think of it strictly as a trial option. Either give a time-limited free trial of the service or a heavily-limited version of the service that shows how it works, but that absolutely nobody would want to use at that level forever.
(And in that latter case, then you'll still find one or two users who are willing to subsist on your free tier, whether that's a 3-feed RSS reader or whatever. Shrug and reflect that those weirdos aren't costing you much.)
I don't agree that having a comfortable free tier inhibits upward movement in the subscription structure of a service.
I've started all the services I pay from their free tiers. Most notable examples are Evernote, Trello, Dropbox and Pocket. As I continued using these tools, I've overgrown them, and the features they offer on subscription tiers started to make sense.
As a result, I've directly bought the highest tier of service which both makes sense and I can afford.
Feedly is different in that regard. They provide a free service, nag me, insert ads into the stream, all at the same time.
Turn down nagging, keep the ads, that's OK. Add a time trial, don't sell ads, that's OK too. But they bombard you, and it comes down to "pay us or go away", and I went away. Not in a decade, but in a week.
I'm a fan of "small web". Simple services which do one thing, and do it well. Simplymail, Source Hut, Mataroa, Smol.pub, etc. They're also paid services, and I also pay for some of them. It's a simple transaction. $X for a year, no tracking, no funny data business, for these services. This is beyond elegant.
I found out that I have got enough of the modern web, with sites overloading my senses and doing all kinds of funny business with my information even if I pay them.
Feedly is a business, they want to earn money and provide services, that's fair. They can operate the way they want, and I'm not entitled to tell them how to operate, or force them. On the other hand, they're not entitled to my money or continued patronage because I opened an account on their service and gave a test drive.
> The really desirable people to advertise to are the ones who have more money to spend.
The people you want to advertise to are not necessarily people who have money. It’s people who will buy your product. That’s the supposed value of online advertising: better targeting. There is still plenty of money to be made outside of the most affluent segments.
> My guess is that a person who subscribes to the entry level of a product is more likely to be upsold to something else than a free user is going to even think about paying.
That’s true. But you still need a way to onboard people on the first paying tier at some point.
> try watching TV during the daytime and it is depressing to see ads for prescription drugs and Medicare scams and personal injury lawyers
That’s because of the demographic who watch TV during daytime: mostly retired people or unemployed people amongst which disabilities must be above average. Forty years ago you will have bombarded with ads for soap.
A happy paying Feedly user ever since Google Reader shut down. I find it great.
I'm also a paying Dropbox customer and they keep nagging about Dropbox for Business and _that_ I find annoying.
I'm not paying for TTRSS. I'm donating to SDF[0], which is free, but I'm paying to keep them sustainable. They added TTRSS to the services they offer, so I moved there. I can clone and install TTRSS[1] to a VPS of mine in 20 minutes, but I'm lazy.
> You are a hamster trying to be converted. That’s the point of the free tier.
I don't think so. Trello's free tier is usable. GitLab and GitHub's free tiers are usable, Pocket's free tier is usable. I'm paying to many services which I can use freely and get things done, and I pay for the highest tier I can make use of and fits my budget, but Feedly's take is esp. bad about their paid tier and nagging.
The problem is not presence of paid tier. It's how it's presented to you. I can pay for feedly, but I don't need the features me, and they were so pushy that it put me off.
[0]: https://www.sdf.org
[1]: https://tt-rss.org/
Your sentiment is frustrating to read as a software engineer.either do it yourself or accept that those people also want to have a great job, good salary etc.
And as stated on another comment: no it's not that bad. I use it free since Google shut down theirs
Your sentiment is also frustrating to read as a software engineer. As I stated before, I pay for a lot of services, and pay for their highest tier plans because I feel that they deserve my money.
However, Feedly feels like they want my money first instead of giving me more or better service, and I don’t feel like they deserve my money, so I don’t pay them.
It does makes sense to me. RSS feeds were supposed to get you to the articles quick enough. With all these pop ups and ads and whatever, we lose the essence of RSS.
> 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?
True, and in the case of the Mac you've got a lot of good options with different design choices.
> 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?
According to the article, Feedly no longer upholds the basic promise of an RSS feed reader: to allow the user to curate a list of RSS feeds and follow them.
From the article:
> For example, I recently wanted to add an RSS feed for a Reddit user, but it was not possible in Feedly. In order to do so, I had to connect to Reddit with my Reddit user, i.e., allow Feedly to access my data. No way, no thanks.
If an RSS feed reader makes it "not possible" to import certain RSS feeds because the app instead wants to use proprietary APIs for those feeds, than the RSS feed reader no longer "does what you expect it do and does it well".
At this point the app is fundamentally broken by design and I too would migrate away from such an app.
I tried this out myself just now, and it turned out to be not entirely true. It's more a case of poor UX. When entering a reddit-url, be it a user-profile or feed, there is a auto-popup with possible actions, one named "feed". Naturally you would click it and then it demands a reddit-connections. I guess, they will use the reddit-API in this case, as it needs a Login, and maybe offers some benefit? But the thing, is you can also just press enter to let feedly discover targets under the entered url, and then it presents you rss-feed it discoverd, which you can follow without a login.
So it's still doing it's job, but in certain cases acts pretty poorly.
That's because Reddit greatly limits RSS access. It's not Feedly's issue, but Reddit.
Furthermore, if the author was so interested in uncluttered UI, they shouldn't say they've "done everything they could" because there's more you can do, such as customize the HTML, CSS or even JS. Clearly, they chose to spend this time writing an empty rant and advertising a tool for Mac. Since majority of users are not on Mac anyway, it's not even a viable alternative because from that point of view, Feedly is much more accessible and user friendly than the advertised product.
I am a Feedly user as well and I have noticed the feature creep but it was easy to ignore, so I hope to be able to keep using it as successfully as I have for the past 9 (!) years.
> 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?
As the article mentions, the problem generally isn't any one individual change - the concern is about the sense of direction for the overall project. The typical direction is from "simple software that helps people to achieve some goals" towards "product with features designed to increase revenue, data gathering, and stickiness" -- like the login-required anti-feature mentioned.
If those changes are gradual then users may not really notice the small differences as they introduced, and if anyone does complain, it becomes easy for supporters of the project to deflect complaints (as, arguably, you may be here -- not ostensibly trying to keep the author with the product, but trying to reduce their credibility and persuade others that there is no problem).
In many cases, free and open source software can help avoid a project falling into dark patterns because it's possible for people who disagree to fork it and maintain/promote their own alternative -- and then for other people to compare the original and the fork on their merits (which are transparent).
The author makes sense to me, and I think it is justified. Any extra prompts beyond what I expect the software to do for my purposes is extra cognitive load -- inputs which I have to deal with using my very limited senses and processing abilities. At some point, it becomes more trouble than it's worth, and that's when I quit and move on.
It's one of the reasons I no longer acknowledge or interact with cookie prompts, newsletter dialogs, notifications, or anything else interferes with my use of a Web page. If anything at all like that happens, I just close the page and move on. (Sometimes I just ignore the cookie prompts and read around them.)
As a long-term strategy, this has paid off by not only saving me time and grief, but also made me realize that poorly designed usability correlates strongly with poor quality content, which I also save time by avoiding.
I think you are speaking from a point of view of having cognitive ability to spare, as opposed to struggling to keep up with cognitive load which is too much to handle.
The second, widest menu can be hidden (and keeps hidden) just with a single click.
> it well but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing purposes...is that really so bad?
If they are done well, no. Problem is they often aren't. An example of this is when I downloaded some app like headspace and they had this sort of relax and be ready to fall a sleep feature. It was relaxing and well done and turned the screen down nicely. Then, as soon as it was over, the screen was set to bright and it asked if wanted to rate it on the store.
Other apps will show marketing over what you are trying to do, or in a distracting manor.
So after a while people will start to associate it with scummy and bad behavior.
> 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.
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?
>Why does feedly imagine I would want to pay £5/month to read rss feeds?
Microsoft and Adobe need massive scale to charge prices that low. They're each probably 10,000x-100,000x larger than Feedly in terms of end-user licenses.
For a service I find useful enough to choose over a free alternative, I'm happy to pay $5-30/month to fund development and maintenance. I don't want all my software coming from the Microsofts and Adobes of the world.
> What does the author think feedly should do with its free tier?
Not the author, but I think they should restrict the free tier to a small number of feeds rather than nag. Asking users to pay to get more is positive whereas asking users to pay to reduce nagging is negative.
Absolutely 100%, myself and my friend were discussing the same about products. An upgrade should be about getting the same benefits but more. 10X speed upgrade does make product look bad. Instead reducing number of feeds you can have or grouping etc but a bad product is not a free tier. It is nuisance to deal with in our busy lives.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Or for not having free tiers.
> 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?
Because Freedly doesn't have Microsoft or Adobe's budget and needs to have its costs covered?
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.
I see where you come from but I didn't read it that way. They point out why the product no longer fits their needs, and why the paid version is not appealing . The conclusion is the opposite of entitled: I'll use something else.
I think the entitled part is where they wrote a whole rant that basically amounts to "they want me to pay for it" and posted it here.
Entitled? Kind of? The thing is, RSS reader clients are pretty much a solved problem, and they aren't particularly resource intensive. You can run your own FreshRSS instance for example for free (https://www.felesatra.moe/blog/2022/06/25/easy-freshrss, you do need a domain name though if you want HTTPS, or just run it on your local machine).
A lot of the service they provide is figuring out how to load out of spec or outright broken feeds. They had some blog posts on this back in the early post-Google Reader days. A self-hosted option will eventually fail to load a feed, and there's not much you can do unless you're a developer.
> This writer is really entitled
Yes, but no. They are entitled like you and I, and everyone, is entitled to good products and not being angry when using them. They aren’t especially entitled to the point to use the word as an insult.
Feedly sells ads. So it’s free, but they include ads. They aren’t a charity benevolently putting out the app and everyone should suck it up and be thankful.
Obviously, people can choose not to use it. And they do. Feedly seems to be in a bit of a doom spiral with being worse and worse and driving away more and more users.
It seems to me that they have some expensive to develop but not very useful (eg, AI to detect stuff in feeds) that users don’t find worth $6 but the costs need covering. So their approach is to keep pushing it on users more and more.
They are entitled like you and I, and everyone, is entitled to good products and not being angry when using them.
Sure, if you're paying for it. If not, prepare for all the ways a company is going to try to make the service profitable, starting with ads and come-ons to paid tiers.
Don't want that? Pay, or self-host something. It's absolutely entitled to make an indignant post about why you're changing away from a service you've used for nine years that amounts to the bastards want to make money off me.
It is ad supported, not free. So there’s a commercial quality expectation. Am I “entitled” if I don’t like a tv show on broadcast tv even though it has ads?
Also, even truly free/oss software has an expectation of quality. And saying “I don’t like it and won’t use it” isn’t being entitled. It’s just a normal human response.
If I’m in a museum and look at a painting and remark to my friends “I don’t like that painting and I won’t buy a print. In fact there are so many paintings in this museum, I don’t think I’ll return.” Am I being entitled?
I think it’s pretty authoritarian to call out people expressing reasonable opinions as if they are “entitled.”
As a reader I’m happy to know that feedly’s free product sucks. That’s very helpful to me. I’m glad OP shared their idea and I hope that people gatekeeping won’t stop OP and others like them from sharing more useful ideas.
Am I “entitled” if I don’t like a tv show on broadcast tv even though it has ads?
Did you watch it for nearly ten years, then make an indignant post ranting about all its flaws because you were tired of ads for the blu-trays or whatever?
I think it’s pretty authoritarian to call out people expressing reasonable opinions as if they are “entitled.”
You've picked a bad time in history to be so badly confused on what "authoritarian" means.
I don’t think it’s entitled at all to expect things to not suck regardless of whether they’re free or require payment. Truly good products make you want to pay to receive a carrot, bad ones to avoid a stick. The only carrots Feedly has to offer are all moldy and gross, so they’ve resorted to more and more sticks.
The author also did exactly what you want by switching to NetNewsWire, so I don’t know what you’re complaining about other than that they made a blog post explaining that decision.
Truly good products make you want to pay to receive a carrot, bad ones to avoid a stick.
Except not getting the carrot free is the stick to plenty of people.
so I don’t know what you’re complaining about
Given I explicitly said what I was complaining about, you should know.
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.
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.
Foss project also have bills to pay.
People regularly act like asses to them without contributing a cent, either.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
There is very little simple about running an RSS aggregator, especially at scale.
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.
I run one at scale, it doesn’t need to be done in a complicated way
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
for apparently nonsense features. this isn’t a patronage model, it’s a product (and the free tier is not what’s being sold)
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.
(misread your tone completely)
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.
I’ve been very happy with 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.
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.
> It eventually pissed off free users enough that they switch to other paid alternatives. That's pretty sad honestly.
Yes but not for Feedly, for those users.
I've been using feedbin since Reader closed, so I guess 9 years. Still grandfathered in a $20/yr plan, even. The best thing about it for me is that I mostly don't think about it other than a visit to see my feeds. It does what I want and isn't awful to look at. Most of the RSS apps I've ever used have integration too. It's a lovely service.
I've been using Feedbin ever since Google Reader died. It has been awesome!
I use it to subscribe to YouTube channels, Twitter, newsletters, Subreddits, HN, and, yes, RSS feeds. I frequently use its sharing feature to pinboard.
I think I still pay the original $2 a month. But even at $5, it is one of my favorite services of all time. Truly a gem.
Readably is a good reader for feedbin on Android.
Feedbin is pretty great. I was particularly glad it was paid, early on, because that made it more likely to actually stay around.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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/eg...
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.
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?
Most people don't actually want to pay for things.
Investors looking for returns
What you’re describing is a kind of anti growth public service. Sounds nice!
https://tt-rss.org/ is a free software, self-hosted alternative and https://ttrss.info/ is a paid hosted offering.
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.
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.
NetNewsWire user here. It’s very good. Would love one running on Linux natively.
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.
QuiteRSS. It even runs on OS/2.
The closest equivalents I’ve found on other platforms are Akregator (Linux/KDE) and QuiteRSS (Win).
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.
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)
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?
https://theoldreader.com/ is still the best thing after Google Reader.
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/. 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)
I read about their redesign today. I was with them for about 5+ years but then eventually shifted to Inoreader.
What are the differences that made you switch?
IFTTT integration was the biggest draw. Newsblur appeared to slow down and I needed something shiny (and different) then. This isn't to say that NewsBlur is bad (it got the IFTTT integration, too) but I prefer Inoreader now. I am used to their interface.
Agreed - I've been using it since Google Reader ended and have used it practically daily since. While they've implemented some limitations and premium options, the interface has stayed basically the same with some unobtrusive elements.
I did have to cull some inactive blogs at one point, to stay within my tier limit, but was happy to do so. Incredible that it's been 9 years with barely any UI changes - I think this demonstrates how effective it is.
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.
Or if you want to self host: https://miniflux.app/
Ugly UI.
So was Google Reader, and it worked fine. That's the whole point.
Google Reader's UI wasn't that bad imho.
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.
Which ... they do.
Just use an app. It's great.
Feedbin is what the author wants. It is even open source.
second that! and NetNewsWire is a great companion to Feedbin when you want native experience on iPad/iPhone/Mac.
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.
If you like simplistic, why not newsboat? I bet you it's faster than any POS web app
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.
Same path here, google, feedly, ragequit feedly due to bloat/jirafication, now inoreader. Up to 150 feeds supported, works awesome on ipad and web.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
Cheers, I'll give it a go.
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
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.
reddit provides RSS feeds: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss
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.
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_upda...
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
FreshRSS (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.
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
> 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.
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.
If you liked it before all the monetization strategies, maybe should have paid for it to keep it sustainable that way?
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.
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).
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) 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, and I use internal search engine heavily).
I don't depend on external services and can process data as I want.
I'm torn between the love of Free Stuff and the understanding that even Free Stuff costs money.
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.
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.
I use a self-hosted yarr [1] instance for rss. It is really minimal and very easy to run (self contained native binary).
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.
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.
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.
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.
NetNewsWire has had an iOS version for a while now.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
Inoreader
NewsBlur is pretty good and does exactly what it is intended for.
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 $100, which I did on the spot. It is a solid service that has grown to be a bit bigger than I'd love, but it does what it needs to. And if you don't like the 'marketing cruft' you can just block it with your adblocker of choice, not a rocket science.
IMO the lowest ad-free tier for Feedly was too expensive for what I'm doing (~6.00$/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.
I've been using Feeder on Android, and it's been quite simple and responsive -
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.
I've been using sparss for about 2 year now, because i can't use feeder(need android >5).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
BTW I didn't understand the need for connecting Feedly to reader. Why didn't you simply import the OPML from Feedly to Reeder?
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.
Is there an easy to use self hosted solution for this?
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.
Reeder (et al.) + iCloud sync was a game-changer for me too.
"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.
Do you think there's an opportunity for a new RSS reader to emerge? And be financially successful, without the BS of ads, etc?
An open source RSS reader could easily be someone's weekend project...
And probably has been many times, given how many there are.
No.
Is it known why Google killed reader? Certainly it wasn't lack of traction.
They're a business. I would presume they weren't able to make enough, or perhaps any, profit off of it.
Have you tried lenns.io? I have a feeling it will meet your needs.
I'm just using Thunderbird for RSS feeds