Feed Wrangler

» see feedwrangler.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

when Google shut Reader down in the summer of 2013 it did a strange thing to a small corner of the internet, it created a market overnight. thousands of people suddenly needed somewhere to keep their feeds and were, for the first time, willing to pay for it. a little economy of paid RSS services sprang up to catch them. Feed Wrangler was one of those, and i was not in that market, i had drifted out of feeds by then the way most people did.

Feed Wrangler was built by David Smith, an independent iOS developer who mostly worked alone, and that was the whole character of the thing. it launched in 2013 as a subscription, a few dollars a month to sync your feeds across the web and your phone. no ads, no venture money. just one person charging a fair price to run a server that did one job well.

it ran for the better part of a decade, which for a solo-built web service is a long, quiet achievement. really though, that is the part worth sitting with. the big free reader with a whole company behind it lasted about eight years. this one, one guy and a subscription, lasted roughly ten. i watched the RSS world from further away every year, but i knew the shape of it. the people who never gave up on feeds mostly ended up somewhere small and paid, like this.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the day it died ~

in April 2022 David Smith wrote that he was stretched too thin across his other apps and that it was time to let Feed Wrangler go. he set the shutdown for the first of March 2023 and gave people the whole eleven months in between to move their feeds out. that notice period is its own kind of decency, the opposite of the surprise-shutter that so many bigger services go out on. after nine years, his words, he turned it off on the date he promised.

~ what replaced it ~

the lesson of the post-Reader years is sitting right here. the feed reader that survived was the small paid one, not the free giant. the services that charged a fair price, like Feedbin, are mostly still running. the free ones kept dying, because a thing nobody pays for is a thing nobody can afford to keep alive. Feed Wrangler proved a single person could run one of these for a decade and then choose to stop, on his own terms, rather than have a boardroom decide it for him.

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