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Your mentality of expecting everything to be free is why there are no alternatives, and also why Google Reader shut down. Building and maintaining these services isn't free, so when people don't want to pay for it there's no incentive to actually make or maintain such service.

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Right. Even if we want to say that it could take a one time deployment and it can just sit there forever (which, it can't. it needs security updates and similar).

The server itself isn't free. Sure if they are smart if multiple people are subscribed to the same feed it only fetches once, but just the constant fetching would eat up resources. Then storing that data, you retrieving it yourself, etc.

An RSS Reader is really a technical miracle, requiring lots of maintenance and development effort. I guess a 10€/Month Subscription would be just the minimum for a such an cutting edge product, right?

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