I’ve been using Feedly ever since Google shut down Google Reader back in 2013. When they announced in August 2013 that they’d be offering a life-time account for the first 5000 users that purchased I immediately sent them the money. Over the years the application has stayed my only feed aggregator. The service has always been stable and in recent months and years the team behind it even added some machine learning features for a Pro+ account tier. This and other features, sadly, have added more and more buttons to the UI, making it more complex over the years.
With the resurrection of NetNewsWire (the first news-reader I was using on macOS back in 2005) and it not supporting Feedly for synchronisation I started looking at Feedbin again. There are also quite a few folks out there who recommend it, so I wanted to give it a try 🙂 To be fair, another reason for me was that after 7 years of using Feedly exclusively, I just need a bit of change.
So, Feedbin is $5 per month (or $50 per year) and you get for that a feed aggregator and not more, nor less. Feature-wise, they two are pretty much en-par. They are both feed aggregators, after all.
What sets Feedbin apart are two aspects: It’s simplicity and, more so, its focus on privacy. Looking at the requests that are made when opening the web application, there are only requests to Feedbin itself while Feedly will at least request data from Twitter.com and Stripe for some reason… While Feedbin also uses Stripe, they don’t include it in every page load but only load it on the billing page.
I think with these changes in place, the only external requests that should ever be made by your browser, with the exception of Stripe, are ones initiated by you.
Feature-wise Feedbin also allows you to subscribe to Twitter feeds directly and you can even subscribe to e-mail newsletters through it! Feedbin basically gives you an e-mail address that you can then enter into a subscription form and mails sent to this address will show up in feed list grouped by sender.
All things considered, Feedbin looks like an awesome product! Let’s see how I’ll think about it after the 14 days trial period 🙂
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Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂