FeedBro has two plans: Free, which stays free, and the Coffee Club, which costs about what a cup of coffee does each month. People ask what the difference really is, so here it is in full — including a part that isn't on the pricing card: how hard FeedBro works to fetch your feeds.
The Short Version
Free is a complete RSS reader for anyone following a handful of sites. The Coffee Club is for heavy readers: no limits, summaries, email digests, faster refreshes, no ads — and premium fetching, which gets through to far more of the sites that try to keep feed readers out.
Side by Side
| Free | Coffee Club | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0, forever | $4.99 a month, cancel any time |
| Feeds | Up to 20 | Unlimited |
| Collections | Up to 10 | Unlimited |
| Rules (filters, highlights, alerts) | Up to 5, with 5 conditions each | Unlimited |
| Fastest refresh you can choose | Every hour | Every 15 minutes |
| Fetching | FeedBro's own methods, plus a few premium tries a day | FeedBro's own methods plus premium services, every time |
| Smart summaries and key points | — | Yes |
| Daily or weekly email digest | — | Yes |
| Ads | Yes | None |
| Clean reading view, Read Later, saved pages, search | Yes | Yes |
| OPML import and export | Yes | Yes |
| Browser extension and Android app | Yes | Yes |
How FeedBro Fetches Your Feeds
Every feed you follow is downloaded by FeedBro's servers, over and over, so new posts appear without you asking. Most sites hand their feed over happily. Some don't: they block anything that isn't a person in a browser, serve different pages to different countries, or put up a "checking your browser" wall. Getting past those takes more than one kind of request.
On Free
Free uses FeedBro's own fetching, which costs us little or nothing to run: a plain request from our servers, a request made to look like an ordinary Chrome browser, a browser running on our own server, and our own fetching server that can ask from other countries. Between them they get the great majority of feeds and articles.
And when a site turns all of those away, Free still gets premium fetching — the paid services described below — up to three times a day for each feed and each article. That covers the occasional stubborn site; what Free can't do is keep paying for a site that blocks everything else all day long.
In the Coffee Club
The Coffee Club adds premium fetching on top: specialist services we pay for per request, which fetch from other networks and countries and are built to get through bot checks and regional blocks. That is what makes a Coffee Club reader's feeds more reliable — the sites that turn our own methods away are exactly the ones these services are for. They cost real money on every request, which is why Free gets a few tries a day and the Coffee Club gets them on every fetch.
One nice side effect: a feed is fetched once for everyone who follows it. When a Coffee Club member follows a feed, it gets premium fetching for all its followers.
If a Site Blocks FeedBro on Free
When FeedBro still can't get a feed or the full text of an article after all that, it tells you so, with two ways forward:
- Use the FeedBro browser extension — free. The extension works in your own browser, so the site sees you, not a server. For an article, open it, right-click the page and choose Fix this page on FeedBro: the full text is saved to FeedBro. For a feed, the extension's reader fetches feeds that block our servers from your browser.
- Join the Coffee Club and premium fetching keeps trying on every fetch, not just a few times a day.
The Rest of the Coffee Club
- No limits. Follow as many feeds as you like, and organise them with as many collections and rules as you need.
- Smart summaries. The key points of a long article, taken from the article itself.
- Email digest. One email, daily or weekly, with what's new across your feeds — and none at all on quiet days.
- Faster refreshes. Choose to have a feed checked as often as every 15 minutes instead of every hour.
- No ads, anywhere in FeedBro.
- Listening — text-to-speech playback is on its way to the Coffee Club.
Which One Is for You?
If you follow up to 20 sites and they mostly work, Free is all you need, and it isn't a trial: it stays free. If you follow more than that, read every day, rely on sites that are hard to reach, or would rather have the day's reading arrive by email, the Coffee Club is worth its coffee. You can start on Free and upgrade whenever you like from the Billing page, and cancel any time.
