Feedly costs $8/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $288 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
$8/mo ($96/yr, forever) is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Feedloft: the pay-once alternative
Feedloft does the same core job for $24, once. Self-hosted Feedly alternative — folders, OPML, full-text search, one SQLite file.
| Feedloft | Feedly | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $24 once | $8/mo ($96/yr, forever) |
| Hosting | Self-hosted — your data, your box | Their cloud |
| Telemetry | None | Vendor analytics |
| Full-text search | Yes (SQLite FTS5) | Yes |
| Full-text extraction | Yes (Readability) | Yes |
| Keyboard shortcuts | Full vim-style set | Partial |
| Desktop app | Yes (Electron) | Web only |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
Break-even vs Feedly Pro is 3 months. By month 12 you're $72 ahead — and it compounds forever, because there's no recurring fee.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need Feedly's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Feedloft is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Feedloft — $24, once
Self-hosted Feedly alternative — folders, OPML, full-text search, one SQLite file.