Every source you follow, in one edition you finish
You set how many items an edition holds. Taper builds it that size from the RSS feeds, newsletters and channels you already follow, then it ends. There is nothing underneath the last one.
Free, and you can bring every source you already follow
Fifteen real sources, a video channel among them, blended the way your own edition is
Try it with the sources you actually read.
Three sources and a size of five in each of these, and a source is anything that publishes a feed: a newspaper, a video channel, somebody’s newsletter, a weblog. Yours can be four hundred of them at a size of fifty, or one at a size of five: the edition is as long as you decide, you keep one for each subject you read, and every one of them still ends.
You make the first two once. The third is every edition.
Paste any address and Taper finds the feed behind it, or import an OPML file whole. Your favourites go on always and are never counted against the size, and everything else takes fair turns, so a source posting forty times a day cannot crowd out one that posts weekly.
Five items, or fifty, on a dimmer with six stops. The size belongs to the edition rather than to the app: Morning and Everything I follow are not the same length, and each keeps its own.
It is as long as you set it, plus whatever your always sources published. Nothing loads when you get to the bottom, and no number anywhere is waiting to be brought down. Anything worth a second reading goes to Saved with one key.
In Ukraine, the app started to send out alarming fake messages late on Sunday night An update in now on the Belgian PM, who’s just left the royal palace where he had a 90minute meeting with the king to offer his resignation. The palace says that the King is “considering…
Al Jazeera29 minutes ago
Sudan's displaced people now face a mounting food crisis, with warnings of famine.
Already here at 5:10 AM
BBC News41 minutes ago
The airline says fuel prices may rise by €2bn in 2028 unless there is an end to the US-Israel war with Iran.
NYT44 minutes ago
Will Americans decide this week that character does, after all, matter?
NPR46 minutes ago
Many people are swapping out their fluoride dental products for ones made with a mineral called hydroxyapatite. What do dentists say about it?
The Guardian
Ex-Trump adviser and former top aide for homeland security alleged to have profited off government role
Product definition rather than a roadmap. None of these comes back later behind a setting.
What falls outside it is what you would have scrolled past.
Taper keeps no copy of an article you did not save. Anything still current arrives on your next refresh, anything worth a second reading goes to Saved with one key, and anything older is where it always was, with the publisher, who never stopped hosting it.
One paid tier, and nothing held back from the free one to make it look thin.
Free
Free
The whole app. Bring every source you already read: the edition size does the metering, so the list never needs a ceiling of its own.
Pro
$5 / month
For readers whose filtering outgrew a keyword list, a hundred sources in, when blocking one word at a time stops being precise enough.
(rust or zig) and not hiring keeps posts about either language and drops the job ads.The objections first, then the mechanics, then the name and the type.
It is deciding what to read, which you were doing anyway: with a scroll, at the bottom of a list, badly. The size takes the top of what your sources published by the rules you set: favourites on always are never counted at all, and everything else takes fair turns.
Nothing. Open it again and it has been rebuilt from what your sources published since. Wednesday’s paper is not Tuesday’s held over. There is no pile to return to and no count of what you missed, because a backlog is the thing that makes people abandon a reader. Anything you want to keep, you save.
That is the case it was built for, and the source list will never carry a number in any tier. Sources you never want to miss go on always and are never counted against the size. Everything else takes fair turns for the slots, and background sources fill what is left over, so a long list gets you a better edition rather than a longer one.
As many as the subjects you read. An edition owns its sources, its filters and its size, so Morning can be ten items from four papers while Everything I follow is fifty. Once there are enough to scroll past, shelves group them. The free tier holds fifteen editions, set where a reader running two or five or nine never meets it.
Saved is searchable, and it is the only thing there is to search: Taper keeps no copy of an article you did not save. That is the same decision as the ceiling. The size is the judgement about what was worth reading, and a second place for everything that missed the cut would only mean owing it something later. Anything current comes back on the next refresh, and anything older is still at the publisher, who never stopped hosting it.
The edition still arrives, with a line at the top naming the source that didn’t answer, the exact address it tried, what came back, and the way to the screen where you fix it. Publishers move feeds without telling anyone, and a source failing quietly for a month is the one problem a reader cannot debug, so nothing about it is smoothed over.
Not in an app store yet. Taper is a web app built to be read on a phone: it holds down to 320px, it installs to the home screen and opens without the browser around it, and it is the same account either way. Native apps are planned, and a store listing announced before it exists is a promise on somebody else’s schedule.
Yes. An edition can be served at its own secret address as Atom and JSON Feed, so the blend, the source tiers and the filters land in whatever you already read in. What does not travel is the ending: your client polls that address, keeps what it has seen and puts a figure beside the folder, which is what clients do and is not something this end can change. The filtering is the part that reaches you there.
Building one feed out of many, and what it can and cannot do
On our servers, and only what the product needs to work: your sources, your tiers, your filters, and whatever you saved. Articles are fetched from the publisher when your edition is built rather than warehoused, so Taper keeps no copy of what you read. Nothing is sold, and there is no ad network to sell it to.
Every source and every edition, as one OPML file, whenever you want it, and it imports into any other reader. Closing the account deletes it rather than deactivating it. Being easy to leave is the part of a subscription that usually gets made hard on purpose, so it is plain here and it stays plain.
Both hold everything and give you tools to sort it afterwards: rules, folders, search, and a figure for what is still waiting. Taper fills the number of items you set and stops. The honest version is that they are more capable and this is more finishable, and which of those you want is a real disagreement rather than a marketing one. Both count your sources on the free tier, at a hundred and a hundred and fifty. Taper counts none, on either tier.
A taper is a candle: a small contained light with a wick that meters how much fuel reaches the flame. It is not about weaning yourself off the news. Taper is a steady amount of it, indefinitely.
It is set in Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, drawn by the Braille Institute so that characters cannot be mistaken for one another. A product arguing for clarity over volume should be set in the typeface that exists for clarity.
Bring the sources you already read. Set a size. Reach the end of it, and find nothing underneath.
Free. No card, and bring every source you follow.