The price anchor
| Feedloft | Feedly | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 — no subscription | $8/mo |
| Annual | $0 after purchase | $96 |
| 5-year total | $24 | $480 |
| 10-year total | $24 | $960 |
Subscription figures from the vendor's published pricing ($8/mo, ~$96/yr); the Feedloft column is the full price, paid once.
Break-even analysis
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.
- After 1 year: Feedloft has cost you $24 total — Feedly has cost $96.
- After 3 years: Feedloft is still $24 — the subscription is at $288.
- After 5 years: Feedloft is still $24 — the subscription is at $480.
What you get for $24 once
- Add feeds from any URL. Automatic feed discovery from any webpage (), rename, move to folders, unsubscribe.
- OPML import/export. Import preserves your folder structure; export produces valid OPML 2.0 you can take anywhere.
- Smart polling. Conditional GET (ETag / Last-Modified, honors 304s), per-feed interval overrides, automatic backoff for failing feeds.
- Keyboard-first. Full vim-style set: j/k to move, o to open, m read, s star, / search, ? for the cheat sheet, Shift+A mark all read.
- Full-text extraction. Pulls the full article via Mozilla Readability when a feed only publishes summaries — per-article or always-on per-feed.
- No renewal, ever. The license does not expire and there is no per-seat meter — $24 is the whole price.
Pricing questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes. The full source is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/feedloft-mvp and always will be. The self-hosted version is the complete product, not a crippled trial — $24 buys the packaged installer, 1-click setup and updates.
Is there a mobile app?
Not a native one. Feedloft is a web app plus an Electron desktop wrapper; if it's hosted on a VPS you can read it from your phone's browser. Feedly's polished iOS/Android apps are a genuine advantage if you read mostly on mobile.
What if a feed only publishes summaries?
Feedloft pulls the full article with Mozilla Readability — per-article on demand, or always-on for a given feed. Extracted content is sanitized and stored locally, so it's searchable too.
Will duplicate items pile up?
No. Item identity falls back to a stable hash of title + pubDate when a feed omits guids, so items don't duplicate on refresh — a bug class the parser was specifically tested against, along with malformed XML and encoding chaos.
Feedloft — $24, one time
Or get Feedloft plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.