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 is, so here it is in full, including something the pricing card doesn't show: 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. It removes the limits and the ads, adds summaries, email digests and faster refreshes, and adds 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 50 | 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 | No | Yes |
| Daily or weekly email digest | No | 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
FeedBro's servers download every feed you follow, again and again, 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.
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. The sites that turn our own methods away are exactly the ones these services are for, which is why a Coffee Club reader's feeds are more reliable. Every request costs real money, so Free gets a few tries a day and the Coffee Club gets them on every fetch.
A feed is fetched once for everyone who follows it, so when a Coffee Club member follows a feed, all its followers get premium fetching.
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 and offers two ways forward:
- Use the FeedBro browser extension, which is free. The extension works in your own browser, so the site sees you rather than a server. For an article, open it, right-click the page and choose Fix this page on FeedBro, and 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 instead of 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 on quiet days.
- Faster refreshes. 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 50 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, upgrade from the Billing page whenever you like, and cancel any time.
