Feedly is a freemium news aggregator that lets you view updates from nearly any news source in one app — despite the fact that it first launched in 2008, in some ways Feedly is a spiritual successor to Google Reader, which shut down in in 2013.
It’s an RSS reader with a web app and mobile apps, and it picked up about half a million new users in the two days after Google announced it was killing its own RSS reader.
But Feedly has also grown in recent years with the launch of new features including an “AI research assistant” called Leo.
Feedly has also apparently grown beyond its previous pricing model — because the company has now announced a new Pro+ plan.
Previously most folks could choose between a free or Pro account. Free accounts are limited to 100 news sources and lack access to some bonus features including notes, highlights, support for saving articles to Evernote, Pocket, or OneNote, and a Power Search feature (which is worth the price of admission if, like me, your day job involves a fair amount of online research).
Pro accounts cost $8 per month or $72 per year and allow you to add up to 1,000 news sources.
A Pro+ plan costs $144 per year (or $99 during a launch sale) and offers support for up to 2,500 sources as well as support for adding Google News or Twitter feeds (including hashtags and user feeds)*.
Unless you have a Feedly Business or Teams plan, you’ll also need to pony up the extra cash to use the Leo features, which include:
- Prioritizes mentions of a specific topic
- Learn from articles you’ve saved to boards and prioritize similar articles
- Mute articles featuring specific topics or keywords
- Remove articles that are duplicates (for example if they show up both in a feed from a news source and a Google News keyword alert)
Feedly also recently added a new Leo skill that it calls “summarization,” which basically means that Leo can read your articles so you don’t have to… instead you can scan a machine-generated summary with just the highlights.
It doesn’t really match my workflow — I subscribe to a few hundred feeds and usually just scan the headlines to see whether I want to read an article in depth. But I could see this coming in handy for folks who want to scan the news without spending the time it takes to read full articles to find the important bits… assuming it works as promised.
For now I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea that Feedly now has Pro, Pro+ and Business plans.
But maybe that’s what it takes to stay in business. Feedly wasn’t the only company that tried to pick up some Google Reader refugees in 2013. Several competitors have already closed up shop.
*If you were one of the folks who took advantage of Feedly’s limited-time lifetime service plan back when that was still a thing, Feedly is offering Pro+ lifetime subscriptions for $99. But this option is only available for Feedly users with a Lifetime Pro service plan.
