What I Use: Feed Reader (Premium)

Like most Google Reader users, I was at a loss when Google shut the RSS/Atom feed aggregator service down in 2013. I had relied on it for several years as a key way to stay up-to-date with what was happening in the tech space. But then I discovered The Old Reader, one of many potential replacements for Google Reader, which was free and offered a minimalist UI. And it obviously worked out: I’ve been using The Old Reader all day every day ever since then.

Well, until now, that is.

At some point a month or so ago, I woke up to an infrequent but still familiar experience in which The Old Reader wouldn’t load but instead displayed an overly cute error message after trying in vain for a while. These things happen, no big deal. But that time, the site was down for the entire day, which is very uncommon. But also very inconvenient. As is so often the case, you don’t realize how much you use something until it’s gone. (I experience this with the clock when I hide the Taskbar in Windows 11, for example.)

I don’t recall how I did things that day, but Laurent is always up-to-date with what’s going on in our space, and there are other sources for the latest news. I muddled through it, basically. But then it happened again, just a couple of days later. And with that, things moved from the uncommon to the unprecedented.

It was time to look into alternatives.

Many won’t be surprised to know I had tested other feed readers from time-to-time. That’s my thing. But this is a case where the familiar, The Old Reader, kept winning out over the new (to me) and different. And it seems like many of the most highly rated feed readers are paid offerings. I’m happy to pay for any product or service I use and rely on, obviously, I’ve even paid for things as arguably frivolous as a web browser New tab experience. But I’m also not rich, and if there’s something free that meets my needs, I’m happy to use that, too. Notion is the best example of that type of solution, and I have no idea why they don’t charge me for it, given how much I use and rely on it.

The thing is, my “needs” for a feed reader are slim, despite using on every single day. So while The Old Reader offers a paid Premium subscription at $3 per month or $25 per year, my needs were met by the free version, which caps out at 100 site feeds. It’s enough.

But the outages made me realize that availability is, in fact, among my few needs for this kind of thing. And so I found myself Googling, yet again, for a new potential replacement. Not for the first time, I asked Laurent what he used, and he recommended Feedly. This was familiar to me and, like The Old Reader, it’s free to use with up to 100 deeds. And it’s a nice looking web app on desktop, with mobile apps on iPhone and Android, something The Old Reader lacks. But it’s also more of a reading experience, and I just want a minimalist list of headlines and blurbs that I can quickly scan and Ctrl + click the items I need to look into. I tried it, again. But it just didn’t seem exactly right.

After evaluating several feed readers, I finally landed on Inoreader as the ideal choice for my needs. It almost didn’t happen. By default, Inoreader uses a rich, card-based layout that’s heavy on graphics and light on text, which is not what I wanted. But after I imported my exported The Old Reader feed list into Inoreader and started mucking around with the display options, I found what I needed: A Magazine layout that includes a small thumbnail graphic, headline, and blurb for each new article in the feed. This was very much like the view I used in The Old Reader.

The paid version is expensive: $9.99 per month or $7.50 per month when you pay for a year (so $90 per year). But here, again, the free version meets my needs. Inoreader lets you subscribe to 150 feeds for free and it has a surprisingly good search feature. It’s familiar in that I just Ctrl + Click on the headlines for articles I want to view in another tab. And it clearly labels those feeds in my list that no longer work; I was surprised to see that five of my feeds quietly disappeared at some point.

Better still, Inoreader auto-updates. When I switch to that tab, it loads any new feed items automatically instead of just displaying an unread count icon or whatever. That was a nice surprise, and it quickly became my favorite feature.

Like many feed readers, Inoreader has a built-in “read later” feature that lets you put articles aside, and an admittedly pleasant reading view that lets you read articles in a distraction- (and ad-) free way right in the app.

But I don’t use either: I use Instapaper for my read later needs, with its browser extension on desktop and mobile app on my phones and iPad. Thanks to the extension, I can just right-click a headline in Inoreader and choose “Save to Instapaper.” This works nicely for me.

There are also Inoreader mobile apps on iPhone, iPad, and Android. This was something I didn’t think I needed all that often, but The Old Reader displayed as a desktop site on mobile, with tiny text, so it was a bad experience. And the Inoreader mobile app is fantastic. So I have started using it when I’m out in the world away from my PCs to make sure I’m always up-to-date.

I’ve been using Inoreader for over a month now, I guess, and when I do go back to look at The Old Reader again, it feels old-fashioned and less ideal. It was something I was used to, and … now it’s not. It’s quite a thing when you replace an app you’ve been using for that long. But this was a good choice. For me, the right choice.