Miniflux does it for me. Although you do have to have a place to install it. I mean, it needs a server. Whether that's a home server that you have, or a VPS, it doesn't matter.

I wrote https://github.com/fallaciousreasoning/progrssive for this reason(and for offline support). It's free, and should be trivial to selfhost (there's also a live version at https://readr.nz)

I use Feedly on the backend, Reeder 3 on my Mac and NetNewsWire on my iPad. I did pay for Reeder years ago and I use it on my Mac because it has good keystroke support (j for next article, etc.) whereas NNW does not.

There's a Reeder 5 and the two improvements (for me) that it has over 3 is that Twitter probably won't say "outdated browser" and refuse to show tweets and support for adding newsfeeds directly. I think MacOS added support for this after Reeder 3 was released.

Mixing the two readers is fine because Feedly is keeping track for them. If Feedly were to start charging, I'd probably start using NNW exclusively since they provide the option of using iCloud to sync.

> I know this is subjective, but it's so hard to find a good rss reader with a modern UI and isn't inexpensive/free

To me RSS and the reader are and should be separate.

RSS is the protocol to query and retrieve updated articles. The reader can be anything you like.

Personally I use rss2email for retrieval and my UI is my email app.

Not sure if web reader is OK for you but I've been using FREE tier of Inoreader for over 10 years now. I love it, it does its job and that's what counts.

Reeder and net news wire are both pretty good imho

I use http://www.netvibes.com