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$25. $50 is the pro++ version. i say this as a happy subscriber. I know a few other sites that do the same, and being able to access a plaintext feed is a huge plus to me.

Only the first image of Arstechnica's image is available in a feed, though, and videos they sometimes embed in the header do not show. I assume both are bugs, but I can open the page if the article is interesting.

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What does the authentication process on RSS look like?

If your question is specific to the Ars Technica subscription, there is no authentication. Each subscriber is given a unique feed link (for whatever they want to subscribe to) so any fetch operation for the link is tied to the subscriber. Ars says that it monitors the use of feeds and will take action if any abuse is detected, but doesn’t go too deep into explaining that part.

Some other services like Stratechery follow the same model, AFAIK.

HTTP auth seems to be "the way".

IIRC, one of the main people at Ars (Aurich?) dislikes RSS a lot and believes that it’s painful to support for Ars’s format and articles.

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