There's no catch

When I find a free service these days, my first instinct is to look for the catch. There’s almost always a catch. Free up to N items, then $9 a month. Free for personal use, then $19 for the “Pro” tier. Free during the trial, then it auto-bills. The catch is rarely a deal-breaker on its own — what’s exhausting is the discovery process. Every new tool gets a where’s-the-wall tax before I commit to learning it.

The Pricing tab on FeedFilters exists for people who think the same way. Click it and the whole page is more or less one paragraph: free, no ads, no tracking, no metered tier, no upsell coming later. If you came looking for the catch, that page is where the not-catch is documented.

It was always going to be free. I registered the domain in 2012 and sat on it for more than a decade, and when I finally sat down to build the thing in 2026 I never seriously considered any other pricing model. There was no comparison spreadsheet, no what if a freemium tier with N feeds and Y rules per month. The plan, going all the way back, was always to put it out there for free.

The reason is simpler than I’d like it to be: I wanted this thing to exist, so I built it. Conceptually it isn’t hard. The model is RSS, and RSS isn’t really moving — the standard hasn’t meaningfully changed in two decades, and the filter primitive (include and exclude tags) is bounded by what’s useful, not by what the platform can support. Once the thing works, there isn’t a lot of feature pressure. A working FeedFilters in 2028 should look a lot like a working FeedFilters today. That’s a different shape than a SaaS that has to keep adding features to keep retaining customers; it’s closer to a utility that can sit in the background and quietly do its job.

The RSS community also has unusually good vibes about this kind of thing. NetNewsWire is the example I keep coming back to: a beautiful native feed reader, completely free, completely open source, getting better year after year because the developer wants to give the community a really nice feed reader. Pinboard is the other one — not free, but $22 a year to keep the lights on, with a service that’s deliberately minimal, almost to a fault. Both of them feel like people who built something because they thought it should exist, the way they thought it should be built. Contributing something to that lineage is more interesting to me than running a startup.

The numbers work, too. Hosting is $5 a month at Linode. The domain is $12.52 a year. I’ve load-tested the production configuration and it can serve a few thousand active users without breaking a sweat. If FeedFilters never grows past that, the costs come out of my pocket and I won’t notice them. If it grows, I’ll probably add a soft donation ask. Quick math: if one in a thousand active users chipped in a dollar a month, the service could run indefinitely. That’s the bar — not make a living off this, not build a business, just keep the lights on long enough for the thing to be useful for a long time. If it turned out that fewer than one in a thousand are willing to do that for a service they actively use, I’d revisit. I hope it won’t come to that.

Underneath all of that is a smaller belief I’ve been circling for a while. Not everything has to be a product. Not everything has to make money. Sometimes it’s better to just make something pure — not riddled with limitations designed to be just-frustrating-enough that you upgrade. Most software is reasonable about this. Some software is generous about it. And some of it is exhausting: a free tier so carefully calibrated that every time I bump into a wall I can feel the dial that was turned to put the wall there. The wall isn’t there because the software couldn’t do the thing — it’s there because someone decided that’s the right pain threshold to convert at. After enough of that, free in software stops meaning free and starts meaning you haven’t found the wall yet.

I’m not anti-business. Not everything can be free; software that needs teams of people or expensive infrastructure has to find a way to fund itself, and I’d like to make a living in this industry too. But this particular project is small, cheap to run, and the kind of thing I’d quietly resent paying for. So I made it the kind of thing I wouldn’t quietly resent. You’re welcome to use it too, if you want to. For free, no catch.