Personal · Weekend build
Build your own Feedly
The blogs you love, fetched into a bowl you own. Feedly charges $7–$12 per month — that’s $84–$144 a year — for something you can replace with focused software of your own. Here is the honest scope, the honest timeline, and the exact prompt to hand your coding agent.
Who this replacement is for
This build targets one reader following a few dozen blogs and newsletters. The goal: subscribe to feeds, fetch them on a schedule, and read everything in one calm place. If you need more than that, keep paying — the point of building it yourself is owning a tool shaped exactly like your workflow, not re-implementing a venture-funded roadmap.
Same build, different logo: this v1 also replaces Inoreader and NewsBlur — they all solve the same core job.
How long it actually takes
One number would be a lie, so here are three. Each tier is a real, usable product — pick the one that matches how much of Feedly you actually use.
| Estimate | What you get |
|---|---|
| 8 hours | subscribe, fetch, read and unread tracking |
| 3 days | scheduled polling, folders, opml, saved items |
| 1 month+ | discovery algorithm, ai summaries, mobile apps — the part you should probably skip |
What a minimal Feedly alternative needs
- feed subscriptions with automatic discovery from a site URL
- scheduled fetching with conditional requests and per-feed health
- read and unread tracking with keyboard navigation
- folders and an all-items river
- saved items plus OPML import and export
Data model
Feed, Folder, Item, SavedItem
Integrations
Cloudflare Cron Triggers, OPML import and export
Capability context
Astro, Workers, D1
The guardrail
Fetch feeds politely with conditional requests, timeouts, and backoff, and sanitize all feed HTML before rendering.
Deliberate non-goals
Do not build social sharing, a discovery algorithm, AI summaries, or newsletter hosting.
The complete build prompt
Copy this into your coding agent of choice. It is scoped for a useful v1 — journeys, screens, business rules, data model, security, tests, and acceptance scenarios included. Pick your stack:
You are building a production-ready software product named “Feedbowl”, a deliberately focused alternative to Feedly. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one reader following a few dozen blogs and newsletters. Primary outcome: subscribe to feeds, fetch them on a schedule, and read everything in one calm place. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Feedly. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The reader pastes a blog URL, the app discovers its feed, and the first fetch fills the reading list with recent items. 2. The reader skims the unread river with keyboard shortcuts, opens a few items, saves one for later, and marks the rest read. 3. The reader imports an OPML file from an old reader, organizes the feeds into folders, and the scheduler keeps everything fresh overnight. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Reading list: folder sidebar with unread counts, all-items river, item excerpts, read and unread styling, and keyboard navigation. 2. Item view: sanitized item content with a link to the source, save action, mark-unread, and next and previous controls. 3. Feed manager: subscriptions with last-fetch time and health status, folder assignment, rename, unsubscribe, and OPML import and export. 4. Saved items: everything saved for later, search within saved items, and a remove-from-saved action. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. feed subscriptions with automatic discovery from a site URL 2. scheduled fetching with conditional requests and per-feed health 3. read and unread tracking with keyboard navigation 4. folders and an all-items river 5. saved items plus OPML import and export DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Fetch each feed on a schedule with conditional requests, honoring ETag and Last-Modified, and back off feeds that repeatedly fail. 2. Deduplicate items by feed and stable item identifier so refetches never create duplicates or reset read states. 3. Sanitize feed HTML before rendering and never execute scripts or load trackers from item content. 4. Track read and saved state per item independently so marking a folder read never touches saved items. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Feed, Folder, Item, SavedItem. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Start with server-rendered Astro pages and ordinary HTML forms. Use HTMX for form submissions, partial navigation, and server-driven updates, then Alpine.js only for small local browser state. The core workflow must remain understandable if either enhancement layer fails. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with the AHA stack: Astro for routing, layouts, and server-rendered pages; HTMX for interactions that benefit from HTML fragment responses; and Alpine.js for small, local interface state. Prefer Cloudflare D1 for relational persistence, R2 for object storage, Workers for server endpoints and scheduled work, Durable Objects only for coordinated real-time state, and Workflows or Queues for durable background jobs—but only when the product requirements call for them. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, Workers, D1 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with Cloudflare Cron Triggers and OPML import and export. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Fetch feeds politely with conditional requests, timeouts, and backoff, and sanitize all feed HTML before rendering. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a site URL without an advertised feed, discovery checks common feed paths and reports clearly when none exists. 2. Given a feed that starts returning errors, its existing items stay readable, its health status shows the failure, and fetching backs off automatically. 3. Given mark-all-read on a folder, every unread item in that folder becomes read while saved items remain saved. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build social sharing, a discovery algorithm, AI summaries, or newsletter hosting.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Feedbowl”, a deliberately focused alternative to Feedly. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one reader following a few dozen blogs and newsletters. Primary outcome: subscribe to feeds, fetch them on a schedule, and read everything in one calm place. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Feedly. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The reader pastes a blog URL, the app discovers its feed, and the first fetch fills the reading list with recent items. 2. The reader skims the unread river with keyboard shortcuts, opens a few items, saves one for later, and marks the rest read. 3. The reader imports an OPML file from an old reader, organizes the feeds into folders, and the scheduler keeps everything fresh overnight. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Reading list: folder sidebar with unread counts, all-items river, item excerpts, read and unread styling, and keyboard navigation. 2. Item view: sanitized item content with a link to the source, save action, mark-unread, and next and previous controls. 3. Feed manager: subscriptions with last-fetch time and health status, folder assignment, rename, unsubscribe, and OPML import and export. 4. Saved items: everything saved for later, search within saved items, and a remove-from-saved action. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. feed subscriptions with automatic discovery from a site URL 2. scheduled fetching with conditional requests and per-feed health 3. read and unread tracking with keyboard navigation 4. folders and an all-items river 5. saved items plus OPML import and export DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Fetch each feed on a schedule with conditional requests, honoring ETag and Last-Modified, and back off feeds that repeatedly fail. 2. Deduplicate items by feed and stable item identifier so refetches never create duplicates or reset read states. 3. Sanitize feed HTML before rendering and never execute scripts or load trackers from item content. 4. Track read and saved state per item independently so marking a folder read never touches saved items. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Feed, Folder, Item, SavedItem. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Render with React Server Components by default. Use Server Actions for authenticated form mutations and add Client Components only for interactions that genuinely require browser state, browser APIs, drag-and-drop, or live updates. The core workflow must remain understandable before client-side JavaScript finishes loading. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with Next.js, the App Router, and TypeScript. Use Server Components by default, Server Actions for authenticated mutations, and Route Handlers for public APIs, OAuth callbacks, webhooks, feeds, uploads, and downloads. Use PostgreSQL through Drizzle ORM with versioned migrations and an isolated test database. Access S3-compatible object storage through a server-only adapter, and run slow or retryable work in a real job or workflow system instead of the request lifecycle. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, Workers, D1 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with Cloudflare Cron Triggers and OPML import and export. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Fetch feeds politely with conditional requests, timeouts, and backoff, and sanitize all feed HTML before rendering. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a site URL without an advertised feed, discovery checks common feed paths and reports clearly when none exists. 2. Given a feed that starts returning errors, its existing items stay readable, its health status shows the failure, and fetching backs off automatically. 3. Given mark-all-read on a folder, every unread item in that folder becomes read while saved items remain saved. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build social sharing, a discovery algorithm, AI summaries, or newsletter hosting.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Feedbowl”, a deliberately focused alternative to Feedly. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one reader following a few dozen blogs and newsletters. Primary outcome: subscribe to feeds, fetch them on a schedule, and read everything in one calm place. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Feedly. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The reader pastes a blog URL, the app discovers its feed, and the first fetch fills the reading list with recent items. 2. The reader skims the unread river with keyboard shortcuts, opens a few items, saves one for later, and marks the rest read. 3. The reader imports an OPML file from an old reader, organizes the feeds into folders, and the scheduler keeps everything fresh overnight. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Reading list: folder sidebar with unread counts, all-items river, item excerpts, read and unread styling, and keyboard navigation. 2. Item view: sanitized item content with a link to the source, save action, mark-unread, and next and previous controls. 3. Feed manager: subscriptions with last-fetch time and health status, folder assignment, rename, unsubscribe, and OPML import and export. 4. Saved items: everything saved for later, search within saved items, and a remove-from-saved action. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. feed subscriptions with automatic discovery from a site URL 2. scheduled fetching with conditional requests and per-feed health 3. read and unread tracking with keyboard navigation 4. folders and an all-items river 5. saved items plus OPML import and export DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Fetch each feed on a schedule with conditional requests, honoring ETag and Last-Modified, and back off feeds that repeatedly fail. 2. Deduplicate items by feed and stable item identifier so refetches never create duplicates or reset read states. 3. Sanitize feed HTML before rendering and never execute scripts or load trackers from item content. 4. Track read and saved state per item independently so marking a folder read never touches saved items. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Feed, Folder, Item, SavedItem. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Start with server-rendered Blade views and ordinary forms. Use Livewire for focused server-driven interactions and Alpine.js only for small local interface state. The core workflow must remain understandable without relying on a client-side application shell. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with Laravel, PHP, Blade, Livewire, and Alpine.js. Use controllers and Blade forms for durable navigation, Livewire for focused interactions, Form Requests for validation, Policies and Gates for authorization, and small application actions or services for domain transitions. Use Eloquent with migrations, database constraints, and transactions; Laravel Storage for private S3-compatible files; queued Jobs for retryable work; the Scheduler for recurring work; and Notifications or Mail for email. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, Workers, D1 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with Cloudflare Cron Triggers and OPML import and export. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Fetch feeds politely with conditional requests, timeouts, and backoff, and sanitize all feed HTML before rendering. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a site URL without an advertised feed, discovery checks common feed paths and reports clearly when none exists. 2. Given a feed that starts returning errors, its existing items stay readable, its health status shows the failure, and fetching backs off automatically. 3. Given mark-all-read on a folder, every unread item in that folder becomes read while saved items remain saved. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build social sharing, a discovery algorithm, AI summaries, or newsletter hosting.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Feedbowl”, a deliberately focused alternative to Feedly. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one reader following a few dozen blogs and newsletters. Primary outcome: subscribe to feeds, fetch them on a schedule, and read everything in one calm place. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Feedly. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The reader pastes a blog URL, the app discovers its feed, and the first fetch fills the reading list with recent items. 2. The reader skims the unread river with keyboard shortcuts, opens a few items, saves one for later, and marks the rest read. 3. The reader imports an OPML file from an old reader, organizes the feeds into folders, and the scheduler keeps everything fresh overnight. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Reading list: folder sidebar with unread counts, all-items river, item excerpts, read and unread styling, and keyboard navigation. 2. Item view: sanitized item content with a link to the source, save action, mark-unread, and next and previous controls. 3. Feed manager: subscriptions with last-fetch time and health status, folder assignment, rename, unsubscribe, and OPML import and export. 4. Saved items: everything saved for later, search within saved items, and a remove-from-saved action. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. feed subscriptions with automatic discovery from a site URL 2. scheduled fetching with conditional requests and per-feed health 3. read and unread tracking with keyboard navigation 4. folders and an all-items river 5. saved items plus OPML import and export DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Fetch each feed on a schedule with conditional requests, honoring ETag and Last-Modified, and back off feeds that repeatedly fail. 2. Deduplicate items by feed and stable item identifier so refetches never create duplicates or reset read states. 3. Sanitize feed HTML before rendering and never execute scripts or load trackers from item content. 4. Track read and saved state per item independently so marking a folder read never touches saved items. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Feed, Folder, Item, SavedItem. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Start with server-rendered Rails views and ordinary forms. Use Turbo for navigation, submissions, and server-driven updates, then Stimulus only for small browser-side behavior. Do not turn the product into a client-side SPA, and keep the core workflow usable when enhancement fails. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with Ruby on Rails and Hotwire: Turbo for navigation, form submissions, and server-driven updates, and Stimulus for small browser-side behavior. Use RESTful controllers with strong parameters and explicit authorization, with domain transitions in testable models or small application services. Use Active Record migrations plus database-level constraints and transactions; Active Storage with an S3-compatible service for private files; Active Job with a durable queue backend for retryable work; Action Mailer for email; and Action Cable only when live updates are required. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, Workers, D1 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with Cloudflare Cron Triggers and OPML import and export. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Fetch feeds politely with conditional requests, timeouts, and backoff, and sanitize all feed HTML before rendering. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a site URL without an advertised feed, discovery checks common feed paths and reports clearly when none exists. 2. Given a feed that starts returning errors, its existing items stay readable, its health status shows the failure, and fetching backs off automatically. 3. Given mark-all-read on a folder, every unread item in that folder becomes read while saved items remain saved. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build social sharing, a discovery algorithm, AI summaries, or newsletter hosting.
Build just one piece
Not ready to replace all of Feedly? Fine. These are the peculiar sub-problems hiding inside it — the parts that are actually interesting to build. Each one is a standalone prompt, scoped to an evening, no strings attached to the full build.
Feed discovery for sites that hide their feedPaste a homepage, get the RSS URL, no matter where they buried it.
Build feed autodiscovery: the user pastes any site URL and you find its RSS or Atom feed. Fetch the page and parse the head for link tags with rel alternate and an RSS or Atom type, resolving relative hrefs against the page URL, including tricky base-tag cases. If the head has nothing, probe the usual suspects: /feed, /rss, /atom.xml, /index.xml, /feed.xml, and the same paths under /blog. Verify each candidate actually parses as a feed before trusting it, because plenty of servers return an HTML 404 page with a 200 status. When a site advertises several feeds (comments feed, category feeds, the real one), rank the site-wide feed first and let the user pick. When nothing works, say so plainly instead of subscribing to garbage. Done when: a plain homepage URL resolves to a working feed for sites using head links and sites using conventional paths, an HTML-pretending-to-be-a-feed response is rejected, and a feedless site produces a clear failure message rather than a broken subscription.
The fetcher that asks nicely and remembers the answerETags, 304s, and backoff for the feed that keeps timing out.
Build the polite scheduled fetcher at the heart of a feed reader. For each feed, store the ETag and Last-Modified from the previous response and send If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since on the next fetch. Treat a 304 as success: update the last-checked time, touch nothing else. Enforce a timeout and a response size cap on every request. Track per-feed health: consecutive failures push the feed into exponential backoff (an hourly feed failing five times straight might get checked daily), and one success resets it. A permanent redirect should update the stored feed URL; a 410 Gone should mark the feed dead and stop fetching entirely. Never let one slow feed delay the rest of the batch. Done when: a healthy unchanged feed costs a 304 and no parsing, a feed that starts erroring visibly backs off while its old items stay readable, and a 301 permanently updates the subscription URL exactly once.
Dedupe for feeds that lie about their itemsSame post, three identities. Your read state shouldn’t care.
Build item deduplication for a feed reader, where every refetch returns the same recent entries and must never duplicate them or reset their read state. Compute a stable identity per item: use the guid or Atom id when present, fall back to the link, and as a last resort hash the title plus published date. Scope identity to the feed, since two blogs can syndicate the same guid. Now the hostile cases: feeds that regenerate guids on every request (detect this by matching on link when the guid is unseen but the link is known), feeds that republish an old item with a new date, and feeds that edit an item's content after you stored it. For edits, update the stored content but keep the read flag and saved flag untouched, because a typo fix should not resurrect an item as unread. Done when: refetching a feed ten times creates zero duplicates, an edited item stays read, and a guid-churning feed is caught by the link fallback instead of flooding the river.
Sanitizing HTML written by strangersEvery feed item is untrusted input wearing a blog post costume.
Build the sanitization pipeline that stands between raw feed content and your reader's rendered item view. Parse each item's HTML and rebuild it against an allowlist: paragraphs, headings, lists, links, blockquotes, code, images, and nothing else. Strip script and style tags with their contents, kill every on-something event attribute, and reject javascript: and data: URLs in href and src. Resolve relative image and link URLs against the feed's base URL so pictures actually load. Then the sneaky parts: drop 1x1 tracking pixels, strip width and height attributes that break your layout while keeping aspect ratios, add rel noopener and target blank to outbound links, and force lazy loading on images so a fifty-image post doesn't hammer the network on scroll. Done when: a crafted item with inline scripts, event handlers, and a javascript: link renders as inert readable text, relative images from a real feed display correctly, and known tracking-pixel patterns never generate a request.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to build your own Feedly?
A basic version — subscribe, fetch, read and unread tracking — takes about 8 hours. Roughly 3 days gets you a solid v1 with scheduled polling, folders, opml, saved items. Matching everything Feedly really does (discovery algorithm, ai summaries, mobile apps) is closer to 1 month+, which is exactly why you should scope down instead.
How much does Feedly cost if I keep subscribing?
Feedly runs $7–$12 per month on public paid plans, which is $84–$144 per year. A focused self-built replacement costs your build time plus close-to-zero hosting.
What stack should I use to build a Feedly alternative?
The build prompt on this page ships in four flavors: the AHA stack (Astro, HTMX, Alpine.js), Next.js, Laravel, and Ruby on Rails. The capability context for this product is Astro, Workers, D1. Pick the stack you already know — the scope matters more than the framework.
What features does a minimal Feedly replacement need?
A useful v1 needs: feed subscriptions with automatic discovery from a site URL; scheduled fetching with conditional requests and per-feed health; read and unread tracking with keyboard navigation; folders and an all-items river; saved items plus OPML import and export. Everything else is scope creep until you personally miss it.
What should I deliberately not build?
Do not build social sharing, a discovery algorithm, AI summaries, or newsletter hosting.
Does this build also replace Inoreader and NewsBlur?
Yes. Feedly, Inoreader and NewsBlur all solve the same core job — subscribe to feeds, fetch them on a schedule, and read everything in one calm place. The scoped v1 on this page covers what most people use any of them for, so one focused build replaces whichever you currently pay for.