The team behind Feedbin, a paid RSS reader, writes about product updates, newsletter support, privacy, and running PostgreSQL backups.
Commenters repeatedly recommend Feedbin as a Google Reader replacement, praising its reliability, restraint on new features, and use with apps like Reeder and NetNewsWire.
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.
Feedbin: https://feedbin.com
There's a small fee, but it's been absolutely worth every penny. The guy's been able to upgrade servers with demand and spend time on improving the interface (particularly for mobile). There are also third-party apps compatible with it, but I haven't found any of them to be as good as the mobile web interface.
It hasn't been perfect (there've been occasional glitches, mostly involving UI slowness), but problems get corrected quickly and the app has continually improved since I signed up, shortly after Reader died. I've been overwhelmingly delighted with it.
As for app vs. service, I've found services useful for keeping everything painlessly synched across devices and computers. It would depend on your feed-reading habits.
Yes, I consume:
1. Twitter via Twitter lists using Feedbin: https://feedbin.com/blog/2018/01/11/feedbin-is-the-best-way-to-read-twitter/
2. Email newsletters via RSS (also thanks to Feedbin): https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsletters-in-feedbin/
3. HN via hnrss.org[†]
4. Reddit via subreddit RSS. (Just add .rss after the subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/golang.rss )
5. A small selection of hand-curated blogs and friends' sites.
If the firehose ever seems too overwhelming (>200 new items), I generally just skim the titles for stand-out items and then mark all as read guilt-free.
[†] For example:
- hnrss.org/newest?points=50
- hnrss.org/whoishiring/jobs/?q=React
- hnrss.org/replies/?id=youruserid
Going to shill for Feedbin (https://feedbin.com). I switched to this in 2012 when Reader blew up and it has remained a consistently excellent product since then.
I use the web client, and on iOS I use Reeder app to access Feedbin. Ben even published the a Feedbin API¹, which I wrote a Feedbin client for vintage computers (I called Mosaicbin)². I even use it for YouTube subs as of this year and it ingests them perfectly (and can filter Shorts).
I'm still on the original pricing but would happily pay $5/mo current price if it came to that. It's a product that would leave a huge void in my life if it ever disappeared.
¹ - https://github.com/feedbin/feedbin-api
² - https://github.com/jonpurdy/mosaicbin
I did this a while back. There are a number of really awesome services now that give you a one-off email address solely for signing up for newsletters, and an in-app reading experience that is markedly better.
I've used Stoop [1] for the better part of two years now, and it's a great product with a great model.
I'm working on using Feedbin instead so that I can get my newsletter emails in Reeder, which I use for reading RSS feeds. That's my main news source, really.
Feedly also provides a lot of this functionality in their Pro+ plan, but they go way above and beyond my needs at a higher price.
[1] http://stoopinbox.com
[2] http://feedbin.com
[3] http://feedly.com
It would work the same for me, if only because I'd redirect the email to my RSS reader (via Feedbin[0] or Kill the Newsletter[1] or similar)! I suspect most people who care about RSS would do the same, but the Webflow docs[2] show it being pretty straightforward to set up, and (imo) it's an easy backup hedge against all your comms getting stuck in spam filters. Plus, it just feels more ADHD-friendly to me to reduce ping noise as much as possible.
[0] https://feedbin.com/
[1] https://kill-the-newsletter.com/
[2] https://university.webflow.com/lesson/rss-feed