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...