Changelog

• September 03, 2022

  Goodbye, Instagram integration!

  

  You might have noticed, if you ever used our instgram integration, that things kept breaking in various places. We kept noticing that a bit too late and spent a lot of time trying to fix that.

  But those days are over now. We’ve decided to axe instagram support and forget about supporting “social media” that Meta company develops.

  There is very little in terms of ‘social’ about any platforms that Meta develops (WhatsApp, Facebook or Instagram). They do everything they can to distance from outside world and make it hard for anyone else to access their data.

  There are at least couple of ways to access instagram data, but all of them are unreliable for us to offer as a part of commercial product. Even if we continued, we couldn’t assure anyone that it will be working flawlessly.

  For those brave souls, that would still like to have access to instagram. It’s still possible to generate good old RSS out of public instagram profile.

  • RSSHub is a great self-hosted option, it’s one of most popular RSS bridge projects in the wild. You might ask around your geek friends, they probably host one and they will share access to it. Or if you don’t have any geeks friends around, PikaPods offers fantastic hosting for open source projects with very competitive price (they also give back to community).

  • RSS.app is a great managed solution and it will take off all the hassle for you. Plug your instagram profile, get RSS and add it to briefcake. Should be easy.

  Good news, though, that we’re lazer focused now on getting feeds working perfectly! as always, we’re looking forward to your feedback, don’t hesitate to write us a note.

• August 28, 2022

  100 feeds limit for free users

  

  We took a very close look at our current data and found couple interesting insights. But most important one, is that …

  We found 28 free users, that have more than 100 feeds. One of them has 16852 feeds, second-biggest free user has 2608. It’s a resource intensive process to monitor these feeds, but sending out emails costs pennies.

  After careful consideration, we’ve decided to cap our free package to 100 feeds to avoid abuse and motivate people to open up wallets to support our service to ensure longevity.

• June 25, 2022

  Welcome to new cofounder and new product strategy

  

  My name is Stas and I silently took over briefcake.com more than a year ago. Been running and working on it ever since.

  It’s been more than 9 years since Google Reader shut down. All other RSS readers I tried didn’t stick around for long in my toolbox. Couldn’t stop wondering why? Once offer to take over briefcake.com came along – I jumped on it to figure that out, with very little idea what I’m getting into. It took some time to understand entire RSS to newsletter landscape and how this project can move forward.

  While on this quest, I haven’t forgotten to improve project to ensure that it will evolve easily into future.

  • Landing page redesigned to better explain appeal of our service
  • App design has been slowly morphing into new forms
  • Been working on integration with Instagram and YouTube
  • Fixed a lot of complaints
  • Significantly simplified entire service to ensure that maintenance burden is minimal
  • Moved all services that we rely on to Europe, to ensure that data of our users is respected

  We now have a very simple project, that is easy to manage. It has been incredibly stable and entire operation could be run on a budget. I also developed a clear vision for projects future and happy to make a couple of big announcements.

  • Leonid is joining forces with me as a cofounder. He previously gave me a hand with redesign and we worked so well together, that we’ve decided to continue our work on this project together, but under more equal terms.
  • We’re extending our free package even further, all “rss to newsletter” specific features will have a livable free tier. But there will be also more premium features, like integration with social networks.

  We are dedicated to make this service affordable and available for everyone. I’m so excited to see us grow together this project, that we’ve decided to share our excitement with over people offering a 50% lifetime discount for our next hundred users- coupon code is LEONID.