Comment by r2222 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by r2222 | Hacker News Reader

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I’ve been very happy with https://feedbin.com

It’s a paid RSS syncing service and web app too, costs $5 per month, I use it with Reeder (and NetNewsWire etc). It doesn’t have any social cruft or AI assistants or ML companions.

I was also a Feedly user when I decided to try Feedbin, and I immediately noticed how much faster fetching the feeds was on Feedbin. I also like to have my email newsletters in same place (forward them to a Feedbin-provided email address), and I can have filters to mark things like sponsored posts and podcast show notes as read automatically, basically like mute filters.

Feedly premium tier costs pretty much the same, and I wonder how well it would stack against Feedbin. There’s also Inoreader which I think offers pretty similar feature set for a pretty similar price.

Feedly free tier is excellent, and you can work around many of its shortcomings by using an RSS reader app. For example, Feedly free doesn’t offer full text articles, but I can extract the full text with Reeder/NetNewsWire/etc on the client-side. If you really don’t care about speed, mute filters, or reading newsletters in your RSS reader, then Feedly free tier is already more than enough.

I switched from Feedly to FeedBin recently for all the same reasons and noticed all the same things you highlighted here. I don't mind the nominal fee of $5/mo since it is a delightful experience that is powerful, fast, and clean. They have added features that I think we need, without the Bloat. Ironically Feedly is only $1 more per month, but I was never enticed to upgrade because the experience was really just awful. FeedBin also gives access to a solid API for you to manage your feeds and supports all the open standards as well to easily import/export them.

I think the takeaway for product owners is that sometimes you need to really zoom out and look at your product. I used Feedly for 8-9 years as a free user and never wanted to upgrade. I was willing to for the right product, but never did. Once I found a simpler product (FeedBin) that met my needs, I immediately paid.

Feedly has shoved ads and half-assed new features into their product for almost a decade trying to get their influx of Google Reader subscribers to upgrade. But no one was compelled to. It eventually pissed off free users enough that they switch to other paid alternatives. That's pretty sad honestly.

> It eventually pissed off free users enough that they switch to other paid alternatives. That's pretty sad honestly.

Yes but not for Feedly, for those users.

I've been using feedbin since Reader closed, so I guess 9 years. Still grandfathered in a $20/yr plan, even. The best thing about it for me is that I mostly don't think about it other than a visit to see my feeds. It does what I want and isn't awful to look at. Most of the RSS apps I've ever used have integration too. It's a lovely service.

I've been using Feedbin ever since Google Reader died. It has been awesome!

I use it to subscribe to YouTube channels, Twitter, newsletters, Subreddits, HN, and, yes, RSS feeds. I frequently use its sharing feature to pinboard.

I think I still pay the original $2 a month. But even at $5, it is one of my favorite services of all time. Truly a gem.

Readably is a good reader for feedbin on Android.

Feedbin is pretty great. I was particularly glad it was paid, early on, because that made it more likely to actually stay around.

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