Host FreshRSS without installing anything
Every RSS and Atom feed in one place, in the order things were published: no algorithm sorting on your behalf, nothing slipped in between two articles.
Starting at €4.99/month
Introduction
FreshRSS installed, updated and backed up by us, on a machine in France. Take your reading back into your own hands: gather every RSS feed in one place, with no algorithm and no advertising. You install nothing and configure no server: the application is online a few minutes after you order, under your own name.
The plan that suits it is App Essentiel at €4.99/month incl. VAT — 2 GB of memory. Reading costs almost nothing; it is the refresh that does the work. On each pass FreshRSS polls every source, parses the XML that comes back, discards what it has already seen and stores the rest. With two or three hundred feeds and several years of articles kept, it is those cycles and the search over the archive that call for the two gigabytes.
Your subscription list belongs to nobody but you: it fits in an OPML file, the format Feedly, Inoreader, NewsBlur and the rest all know how to export — and that FreshRSS reads back on import. Switching takes five minutes, folders included. In the other direction the same file follows you elsewhere: the opposite of a service that holds your list hostage.
What FreshRSS can do
OPML in and OPML out
A single file holds your sources and how they are filed. Export it from your current reader, drop it into FreshRSS, and your reading list comes back arranged the way you left it.
Google Reader and Fever APIs
FreshRSS speaks both of the protocols mobile readers know. Desktop and phone apps therefore connect to your own instance, and an article read on the train shows up as read on the computer.
Saved searches
Search takes a syntax: by author, by title, by content, inside a given category. A search worth keeping is saved and becomes a permanent view sitting next to your folders.
Feeds where there are none left
For a site that removed its feed, FreshRSS can pull the articles straight out of the page using XPath selectors. A little setup at the start, and the source is back in your reading list.
What people actually use it for
Keeping a serious press watch
Two hundred sources filed by topic, and a saved search that surfaces every mention of a client. Sorting follows your criteria, not what a social network decided to promote.
Following official publications
A public-sector officer subscribes to the feeds of official texts and tender notices. Nothing depends on a newsletter that lands in the junk folder.
Following the research in your field
Open archives and most journals publish a feed per subject area. A doctoral student groups them into one category and sees new work appear without opening an account with every publisher.
Knowing when a dependency changes
Release pages on the main forges expose an Atom feed. A developer subscribes and learns that a library has moved on before the update breaks something.
Watching competitors and the local press
A small business aggregates the blogs of its sector and the regional paper. A quarter of an hour in the morning replaces an hour spent hopping between tabs.
Hosted in France
In our own datacentre in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, which we operate ourselves. What you read, and at what time, feeds no advertising profile.
Frequently asked questions
Nothing. You choose the application, fill in the fields it asks for — often an email address and a name — and it goes online. Access arrives by email with the address and the credentials.
Through the OPML file: your current reader knows how to export it, FreshRSS knows how to read it, and your folders come along. One useful detail: OPML carries the sources and their filing, not the read state or your starred items. So you arrive with your reading list in order but a fresh article list.
Yes, in two ways. The web interface works well on mobile, and above all FreshRSS exposes the Google Reader and Fever APIs: readers installed on iOS and Android connect to it like any other service, and read state syncs in both directions.
FreshRSS can build one: you give it the address of the page and XPath selectors pointing at the title, the link and the body, and it produces a feed like any other. It takes a quarter of an hour of tuning per source, and it settles the case of sites that dropped their feed hoping to drive you back to their home page.
Yes, they are part of the service. A self-hosted application left un-updated is a security risk, not a saving.