Self-hosted Feedly alternative: own your feeds with FreshRSS

Every few years a beloved reader dies or gets bought. Google Reader shut down in 2013 and took a chunk of the open web's plumbing with it. Feedly picked up the refugees, then slowly moved search, filters and notes behind a subscription and added an AI layer on top. The RSS feed itself never went anywhere — it's still the quiet, ad-free way the web publishes. What changed is who owns the reader. FreshRSS is the version you own: your subscriptions, your read state, your rules, on your server.

What FreshRSS is

FreshRSS is a self-hosted RSS and Atom aggregator — the real, full-featured thing, not a stripped demo. A feed is just a file a site updates whenever it posts; a reader is the thing that checks those files for you and lays the results out to read, in order, with nothing in between. FreshRSS is free and open source under the AGPL, actively maintained, and it has quietly become the reader a lot of former Google Reader and Feedly users land on. You point it at feeds, it polls them on a schedule, and it keeps every article's read and starred state in a database you control. The reading view is keyboard-driven — press a key to move to the next article, another to star or share it — with themes and a compact or roomy layout if you want one. Where Feedly's free tier caps how many sources you get and hides real search behind Pro, FreshRSS has no seat limits, no feed limits, and no upgrade wall. It's light enough to run on a Raspberry Pi, speaks the sync APIs the good mobile apps expect, and treats your data as an export you can walk away with at any time.

The features that actually matter

• Filters and rules — Match articles by keyword or regular expression and act on them automatically — mark as read to quiet a noisy source, or star the ones you never want to miss. This is the kind of filtering Feedly reserves for its paid tier.
• More than blogs — Anything that publishes a feed works: podcasts, YouTube channels, subreddits, a GitHub project's releases, a mailing-list archive. FreshRSS pulls them all into one timeline instead of five apps and a browser tab.
• Mobile sync with the apps you already like — FreshRSS implements the Google Reader and Fever APIs, so it syncs read and starred state with Reeder, Fiery Feeds, FeedMe, Readrops and many others. Phone and desktop stay in lockstep.
• Multiple users — One instance hosts separate accounts, each with their own feeds, folders and settings — a family or a small team without paying per seat.
• Full-article retrieval — For feeds that only publish a teaser, FreshRSS can fetch the original page and pull the body out with a CSS selector, so you read the whole thing without leaving the reader.
• Extensions — A real extension system with an official repository lets you add things — sticky feeds, reading-time estimates, themes, integrations — without forking the app.
• WebSub push — For publishers that support it, articles arrive the moment they're published instead of waiting for the next poll, so breaking news actually shows up fast.
• Saved searches and full-text search — Search across everything you've collected, and save any search as a virtual feed you can open like a folder. Feedly charges for power search; here it's just there.

Why self-host it instead of the hosted version

Your reading list is data about you. What you subscribe to and what you save is an unusually precise profile, and a hosted reader has every reason to make use of it. On your own FreshRSS, the only thing touching your feeds is your server — no ad targeting, no model trained on what you read, no analytics you didn't ask for.

Cost that doesn't scale per seat. Feedly Pro is a monthly per-person fee that climbs as the tiers do. A FreshRSS instance is one small server whether you have one reader or twenty — add your partner, your kids, your whole team and the price doesn't move.

Control and permanence. No feed caps, no folder caps, no feature that vanishes when a plan changes under you. You pick the theme, the polling schedule and the retention. And because it's yours, nobody can sunset it, sell it, or pivot it into something you didn't sign up for — the exact thing that keeps happening to hosted readers.

Who it's for

• News-heavy professionals — journalists, analysts and researchers who follow dozens of sources and want filters and search, not an algorithm deciding what matters.
• Privacy-minded readers — anyone who left Feedly precisely because their attention became the product, and wants a reader that reads and nothing else.
• Families and small teams — a shared instance where everyone gets their own account and feeds for the cost of one small server.

The honest setup notes

We won't pretend raw self-hosting is free of chores. FreshRSS needs a database — SQLite is fine to start, but a busy multi-user instance wants MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL, which you now own and back up. Feeds are only current if something polls them, so you set up a cron job (or WebSub) and make sure it keeps running; a reader that silently stopped updating three days ago is worse than useless. Updates ship regularly, and you're the one applying them and reading the release notes. Want password-reset emails or notifications? That's SMTP to configure. None of it is hard, but it's a standing responsibility — a small server you now administer.

Or let us run it. On Caliber Node the database, the cron polling, TLS, backups and updates are handled, and you still get real logs, SFTP and a full export whenever you want it.

Deploy it in one click

Rolling your own means a Linux box, a web server, PHP with the right extensions, a database, a cron entry, a TLS certificate and a maintenance calendar — an afternoon before you read your first article, and a recurring obligation after. Or you skip all of it. On Caliber Node you deploy FreshRSS in one click and it comes up on its own subdomain with HTTPS, a database, scheduled polling and automatic backups already wired together. No PHP versions to reconcile, no cron syntax to debug, no certificate to renew. A running reader in a few minutes and a login — and underneath it's the same open-source FreshRSS, so nothing is locked in and everything is yours to export.

First run

1. Deploy FreshRSS from the Caliber Node catalog, open your new subdomain, and log in with the admin account you set.
2. Coming from Feedly or another reader? Export your subscriptions there as OPML, then import the file under Subscription management — every feed and folder lands at once.
3. Add a few feeds by hand: paste a site URL and FreshRSS finds the feed for you.
4. Set your refresh interval, then on your phone point Reeder, FeedMe or another app at your instance over the Google Reader API.
5. Create a filter — auto-star a keyword you care about, or auto-read a noisy source — and watch your feed calm down.

The bigger picture

Reading is one of the last things on the web that doesn't have to be run through an algorithm or paid for with your attention. RSS was built on that premise and it still works — the only question is who holds the reader. Hand it to a hosted service and you're renting access to your own subscriptions, on terms that can change any time. Run FreshRSS yourself and the whole thing — feeds, read state, filters, history — sits on a server you control, exportable and permanent.

Deploy FreshRSS in a few minutes →

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