Account

Trial and license

Free for 30 days, then $29 once.

No subscription, no account and no server: your feeds, articles and settings stay on your Mac.

Activating

Enter your license key under Settings → License. One license covers up to five Macs.

Moving to another Mac. Deactivate this one first, under Settings → License. The seat and the key are released together or not at all, and it asks before doing it — so if the license service can’t be reached, nothing is lost locally and you can try again.

A license is stored outside your article library, so it survives a damaged one.

Privacy

What Feeds does and does not send anywhere. Last updated 15 August 2026.

Feeds has no account, no server of ours, and no analytics. This page names the few things that do leave your Mac.

The short version

Your subscriptions, your articles and your reading history live on your Mac and nowhere else. Brooding Jay cannot see what you subscribe to, what you read, or when you read it, because none of it is ever sent to us.

Four kinds of request do go over the network. All of them go to somebody else, and none of them to us: the sites you subscribe to, the media players embedded in what you read, GitHub for update checks, and Polar when you activate a license.

Since 1.15.0 Feeds can also sign in to a newsletter you pay for, on your instruction, and send that session to that publication so your paid posts arrive whole.

What is stored, and where

Feeds keeps everything in one database file on your Mac, inside your user Library. Feeds, articles, tags, packs, notes, settings and your license key are all in it. Nothing is uploaded, backed up or synced.

That file is the whole library. Delete it and the library is gone — including from us, because we never had a copy.

Time spent reading

Since 1.14.2, Feeds measures how long you spend in it so the reading stats can report real time rather than an estimate. What is recorded:

• One total per day. Not a log of sessions — there is no record of when you read, how often you stopped, or how long any single sitting was. Just a number of minutes against a date.
• Only while you are using it. The clock stops when the window loses focus, when the Mac sleeps, and after ninety seconds without input.
• It stays on your Mac. It is never sent anywhere, and there is no goal, target or streak attached to it.

Turning off “Show today’s time” in Settings hides the display; the measurement still runs, so switching it back on later finds the time already counted.

What leaves your Mac

The sites you read. Feeds fetches feeds, article pages, images and site icons directly from the publishers, the same way a browser would. Those publishers can see your IP address and that the request came from Feeds — it identifies itself as Feeds (+https://broodingjay.com) rather than impersonating a browser.

There is no server of ours in between: no list of what you read exists anywhere, ours included.

Remote images can be turned off in Settings → Reading, and then they are not fetched at all. That switch also stops embedded players loading — see below.

Newsletters you pay for. From 1.15.0, Feeds can read subscriber-only posts as you rather than as a stranger. Nothing about it happens unless you set it up:

• You sign in, not Feeds. The sign-in form is the publisher’s own page, opened in a window of its own. Feeds does not fill it in and never sees your password. The cookies that result are kept in a separate store, apart from everything else the app does.
• You sign in at the publication’s own address. From 1.15.1 each publication you tick carries its own Sign in… button, so a newsletter published on its own domain is signed in to there, and the session it issues is held for that address. Nothing is sent to an address you did not sign in to.
• You name the publications. A session is attached only to publications you tick in Settings → Reading → Paid subscriptions. Being signed in is not permission to attach it to anything else.
• One publication at a time. Cookies go only to the address of the post being read, and only when that post’s own feed is one you ticked. If a publisher redirects somewhere else, the session does not follow.
• Free posts never trigger it. Every article is fetched anonymously first. A session is only tried after that fetch comes back a subscribe wall, so nothing free is ever read while signed in.
• Sign out everywhere, in the same place, deletes every publisher cookie the app holds.

Nothing about which posts you unlock is recorded anywhere but your own library, and none of it reaches us.

Embedded players. From 1.15.0, a YouTube, Spotify, Vimeo or SoundCloud embed inside a post plays in place instead of appearing as a link. That means the post loads a frame from that provider, and the provider can see your IP address, exactly as it would if you opened the same embed on the web. YouTube is always loaded through youtube-nocookie.com, even when the publisher’s own embed named the ordinary address. No other provider is allowed to load, and at most four players appear in one post. Turning off Load remote images in Settings → Reading stops all of them being fetched, and turns each one back into a link.

Update checks. Feeds asks GitHub once an hour whether a newer version exists. GitHub can see your IP address. It cannot tell one copy of Feeds from another: the per-install identifier that the update library normally issues, stores, and attaches to every check is deliberately blanked, so every copy sends the same value.

License checks. In the purchased version, activating a license and its once-a-day recheck go to Polar. Those requests carry the license key and the product identifiers, and — on activation only — a label naming this Mac, in the form Feeds on <your computer's name>. That label is there so you can recognize your own machines in your license list and release a seat you no longer use. It is the only thing Feeds sends anywhere that describes you rather than a web page.

Nothing about your feeds or your reading is included in any of it. The 30-day trial makes no license requests at all.

Video, only when you play it. Videos play through youtube-nocookie.com, and nothing is requested from YouTube until you press play.

What is never collected

No analytics, no telemetry, no usage statistics, no crash reporting, no advertising, no profiling, and no third-party trackers of any kind. There is no code in Feeds that reports anything about how you use it.

The browser button

Save to Feeds holds one permission, activeTab, granted per click. When you press the button it can read the address and title of that one tab, and hands them to Feeds on the same Mac.

It has no access to your browsing history, to your other tabs, or to any page you did not press it on. It sends nothing to any server — not to ours, not to anyone’s. The app on your Mac does the fetching, with the same rules it applies to an address you type in yourself.

Buying and support

The purchase is handled by Polar, the merchant of record, who collect your name, email address and payment details under their own privacy policy. Feeds never sees a payment detail, and Brooding Jay never sees a card number.

If you write to support@broodingjay.com, we have your message and your email address, and use them to answer you. Writing for support does not add you to a mailing list.

Your choices

• Turn off remote images: Settings → Reading.
• Remove a license from a Mac: Settings → License → Deactivate, which releases the seat and the label with it.
• Delete everything: quit Feeds and remove its library file. Nothing survives elsewhere.

Changes to this page

If what Feeds sends ever changes, this page changes with it in the same release, and the change is named in the Changelog. Questions about any of it: support@broodingjay.com.

Getting help

Where to write about a problem.

Email support@broodingjay.com. The address is also in Settings under Help, and in About Feeds.

For a security issue, use Help → Report a Security Issue… in the app rather than posting publicly.