Get Tiny Tiny RSS. It's a blessing. https://tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/wikis/home

Thunderbird has an RSS reader that works well:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/

As a non-Google Reader user, what did it offer that Feedly doesn't on the free tier?

There are many alternatives now, Feedbin and Feedly to name a couple.

Digg Reader fits the bill