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# Introducing Birchfeed, the best RSS app that works in your favorite RSS app already
- URL: https://birchtree.me/blog/introducing-birchfeed-the-best-rss-app-that-works-in-your-favorite-rss-app-already/
- Published: 2026-08-31T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-31T14:59:59.000Z
- Author: Matt Birchler

I've joked here and there that I should make an RSS app. I genuinely didn't really mean it, but a couple months ago, after doing some work with RSS in Quick Reads, I thought, hey, I think I could do this better in a few ways, so why not? The foundation of an RSS syncing service isn't really something you can differentiate on, but there are some things I think can be better and I wanted to explore it.

I'm not going to go on and on about this, but here's the gist of what [Birchfeed](https://birchfeed.app/?ref=birchtree.me) is.

## If you like your RSS app, you can keep your RSS app

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2026/08/004-copy.jpg)

I love the open web, and because RSS came to prominence in the pre-web 2.0 era, a lot of the basics are effectively open standards. This means that a lot of RSS apps allow you to connect any service that uses a couple standards. Google Reader and Fresh RSS are the big ones, and some apps allow you to do it through Fever (god, Fever was cool back in the day…feed a fever!).

As such, I've built Birchfeed in a way that it complies with all three of those standards. So if the RSS app you use today supports generic connections on those standards, you can use Birchfeed in those apps right now. Not theoretically, literally now. I personally have been using Reader Classic the entire time I've been developing this app as my client on my devices, and it works completely flawlessly. I switched from my previous sync service provider to Birchfeed and genuinely forgot about the change when I was checking my feeds.

I have not tested every app. However, I have confirmed that it works well with Reader Classic, NetNewsWire, and Unread. There are plenty of other RSS apps out there, and I would expect most of them to work fine, but your mileage may vary.

## A great web app

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-31-at-9.44.50-AM@2x.png)

The place I feel most RSS apps fall down is in the web reader experience. Sure, you can read there and they typically have some additional features you can utilize, but they don't seem to be very fast in my experience, and they tend to be mouse-driven rather than keyboard-driven. One of the things I really love about apps like Reader Classic is that I can navigate the app quickly and get through my feeds, all with a few keys on the keyboard. This experience was completely absent from the web.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-27-at-1.23.16-PM@2x-1.png)

I don't know if everyone's going to love the web experience as much as I do, but I genuinely think it is fantastic and the best web reader I've personally ever used. It's not outrageously gorgeous, but it's got a stark minimalism that I think aligns with its general purpose as a sync service. But also, I wanted everything you do in the app to feel as though you are interacting directly with the database. I do not have superfluous animations, I don't use too much white space, and most actions are accessible via keyboard shortcuts.

## The news stream

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-27-at-1.47.54-PM@2x-1.png)

The news stream is my tool for news obsessives. The idea of this is that instead of just opening your reader, you can open this dedicated window and you'll get a live stream of all the news happening across your feeds. Put this on a second monitor, toss it in the background, whatever. Set it and forget it, and just pop in to see what's happened in the last few minutes.

RSS fundamentally has a bit of a delay, so this may be a bit slower than a social media timeline, but it's going to be pretty darn good most of the time.

## Automations

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-31-at-9.45.31-AM@2x.png)

Birchfeed supports some automations that can streamline your RSS life. It's a relatively straightforward if this then that setup, and you can watch specific feeds, folders, or your entire collection for specific words that appear anywhere in the title, in the author field, or the article itself. If something matches your conditions, you can receive an email notification about that article. You can automatically star it or you can automatically mark it as read. Some use cases for this include:

- Get an email when someone writes about you (duh)
- Mark articles as read when they're written by that annoying person at that one publication you like overall
- Alternatively, get an email when someone you really like from a publication publishes something
- Mark articles as read when they are clearly sponsored posts or deal summaries that you don't care about

This feels like an inevitable place where functionality will expand as more people start using it, so definitely provide feedback if you'd like to automate something that's not possible right now.

## The daily briefing

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-27-at-1.38.13-PM@2x-1.png)

I follow a bunch of feeds and I try to keep up with the news. However, some days I'm just too busy and I literally never look at my feeds during the workday. I've used the daily briefing feature to create an email that's sent out to me at 4 p.m. every day that includes a summary of the biggest news stories from my feeds in the past eight hours.

I freaking love this feature.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-27-at-1.39.30-PM@2x-1.png)

But if that's not what you want for your daily briefing, that's fine. Maybe you want to wake up to an email with all the things that happened overnight. No problem. Set your briefing to arrive at 5:00 a.m. and show the last 12 hours of news. Maybe you don't check your feeds really at all, and you just want to get one email a day telling you what happened over the last 24 hours. All of these are possible with the daily briefing.

These emails are generated with an AI model in the background and are opt-in. So if you're not into that sort of thing, you don't have to use it. Because the model has a real cost, I am also not able to currently offer more than one daily email. Yes, I've also had the thought that a morning briefing and an evening briefing would be kind of nice, but as ever, I am very concerned about costs spiraling out of control, so I am limiting this for the time being.

## Newsletters

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-31-at-9.28.57-AM@2x.png)

I learned my lesson with Quick Reads. People love to get their newsletters delivered to their Read Later service and their RSS service. As such, on day one Birchfeed includes the ability to subscribe to newsletters and have them delivered inside your RSS app.

## Quick Reads connector

What's the number one action you take in your RSS app? Well, it's probably mark has read, but besides that, the next most likely action you probably do is sharing articles to read later (if it's something else, let me know. I'd actually be curious about other use cases).

Well, this is where you can call me biased because right now the only sharing option is to Quick Reads. That said, if you have a Quick Reads account, then sharing from this app is super simple. You can connect with two clicks and from then on you'll see a "save to Quick Reads"

## Feeds

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-27-at-2.20.57-PM@2x-1.png)

You can do all the feed management you would expect, putting them in folders, getting their feed URLs, unsubscribing, but you can also go to a dedicated settings page for your feeds and perform bulk actions. You can also use this page to filter for feeds that haven't updated in a while to see if you want to clean up abandoned feeds.

There's also a Feed Doctor tool that will show you any of your feeds that aren't resolving and helps you try to fix them.

RSS feeds are sticky things at times, and I've learned there are a ton of ways feeds can be configured wrong, have errors, or be positively massive, but users expect them to work. If you have any issues with feeds, the feed doctor can usually help, but if you're stuck, please feel free to use the support

## Auth

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-27-at-2.21.34-PM@2x-1.png)

As you might expect from my other projects, Birchfeed is completely password free. You sign up with a magic link in an email, and then I'd highly recommend creating a passkey to make logging in in the future seamless.

Authenticating with other apps requires generating API keys, which also, per my typical policy, are only visible once to either you or me. My database has hashed versions of the keys, which I can't even reverse engineer.

Long story short, as always, I refuse to store sensitive authentication information in my databases. You're welcome. 😂

## Data portability

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-27-at-2.21.47-PM@2x-1.png)

This one is short and sweet. RSS is a fundamentally open system, and while I let you import an OPML file you bring from somewhere else, you can also at any point export your entire library as an OPML file so you can bring it somewhere else. You are not locked in to Birchfeed at all.

## Pricing

[Birchfeed](https://birchfeed.app/?ref=birchtree.me) has a 14-day free trial with no requirement to add a credit card at sign-up. This should give you more than enough time to import your feeds and try out the service with whatever RSS apps you want and see if it works for you.

Through the month of September, you can sign up for an annual subscription for $29 per year, and you will be locked into a discounted rate for the lifetime of the account. Starting October 1st, the annual price will be $39 per year.

I think this pricing is competitive, but also represents that this is a premium product that delivers real value to RSS readers like myself. I hope you give it a shot and enjoy it!