Quick answer
Yes — Feedloft is a one-time-purchase alternative to Feedly. It costs $24 once, while Feedly runs $8/mo — about $96 per year, every year. Self-hosted Feedly alternative — folders, OPML, full-text search, one SQLite file. It is for people who want the job done on their own hardware without a renewal date — not for teams that live inside Feedly's ecosystem.
The verdict
Switch to Feedloft if you are an individual or small team paying Feedly $8/mo for work your own machine can do. 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.
Stay with Feedly if your workflow depends on its integrations, you need enterprise features (SSO, admin controls, SLAs), or your team is large enough that per-seat collaboration tooling is worth the bill. Feedloft does not try to replicate those.
Head to head
| 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 |
| 5-year cost | $24 | $480 |
Where Feedly still wins
- Ecosystem and integrations. Established tools accumulate years of third-party integrations, templates and add-ons. If your workflow is wired into Feedly's ecosystem, switching means rebuilding that plumbing — a real cost.
- Team and enterprise features. Shared workspaces, granular permissions, SSO, audit logs and a vendor to call when something breaks — that is what the higher subscription tiers actually buy, and a pay-once app does not come with it.
- Familiarity and hiring. Feedly is the name people already know. Onboarding a team onto a tool nobody has used before takes time the subscription never charges for.
Where Feedloft wins
- Price, permanently. $24 once versus $96/yr for as long as you use it. There is no renewal, no seat count and no tier gate.
- 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.
The math
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.
Common 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.
Try Feedloft — $24, one time
Or get Feedloft plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.