Feedly kindly sent me an reminder that my subscription was about to be renewed. They were also kind to tell how much they would be charging me. It was a lot. 153,84 euros to be exact.
I do like Feedly. I have used Feedly for quite few years and got used to using it. The UI is really good. Their Android app is solid. Newsletters in the Feedly instead of inbox eases clutter so much. You can follow websites that don’t have RSS feed.
To get the newsletter feature you’d need to have Pro+ subscription. In that subscription you get also their AI tools. It summarizes the posts, allows you to “mute noise” and can do other things for you. Summaries was the only things I faced from the AI features, and those were totally useless as I do in fact like to read the whole post instead of quick overview. So, AI features were totally useless for me.
Their reminder got me thinking. Do I really get value for money? Is there some cheaper option that could do the same (i.e. follow RSS feeds and newsletters). I do like prospecting new tools, so there I went and scoured the internet to find alternatives and compare those.
Inoreader was looking as an good alternative. With half the price, I’d get the same features I liked: newsletters, RSS builder and solid basic tool to follow RSS feeds. But for some reason it felt too corporatey to me, like Feedly had started to feel.
Another seemingly popular alternative was Feedbin. With 50 dollars a year you get to follow RSS feeds and newsletters. They don’t have RSS builder, but on the other hand I used that feature only for a handful of sites that don’t have RSS available (shame on you btw).
Some friends over Koodiklinikka and Post Status Slacks also suggested Feedbin. Om Malik uses it. Chris Coyier uses it. Daniel Bachhuber uses it. So I thought it must be good and worth giving a closer look.
Quickly I felt like the Feedbin might be the right tool for me. It has been running since 2013. It’s open source. It’s built and run by two guys. The web app is dead simple and has zero clutter. Oh gosh, how much I love the fact that one can go thru the code base and open an issue in Github.
They have blog a blog that is not full of SEO and marketing crap. I especially enjoyed the post about schema changes in PostgreSQL, and announcement of moving to colocation with server rack images brought warm to my heart.
Feedbin also has an feature where they can try to fetch the full content of the post even if feed provides only an excerpt. That might have been in Feedly as well, don’t know, at least never stumbled upon it on the cluttered settings panel.
By the sound of the blog posts and other resources, I felt that Feedbin is also best aligned with my ideals of being good internet citizens and service providers. One major proof of that is their simple privacy policy that is no-bullshit.
The only downside I could figure is the fact that they don’t have an Android app. Which to be honest, strikes a bit odd since they have an iOS app. Some say their web app is so good that there’s no need for separate app at all.
I do like having an feed app. It separates the reading experience from normal browsing. I guess it’s a mental thing more than a practical tho.
Luckily Feedbin has an good list of recommended apps. For Android, their first recommendation was Capy Reader. Another open sourced tool. That’s nice! And the Capy Reader feels just like Feedbin when you use it. Same type of an interface, almost the same adjustments, sync works flawlessly and most importantly is has zero clutter in it.
So I decided to move over from Feedly to Feedbin. It was fairly easy with OPML file. Only newsletter subscriptions needed to be moved manually. Luckily I had subscribed to all newsletters with addresses on my personal domain, so only thing to do was update routing rules on Fastmail. Took me less than 30 minutes.
And once I was there, I decided to add Youtube channels I follow to Feedbin as well since those appear quite nicely on the feed. Yeah, one could have done that in Feedly as well I guess.
Leave a comment