About Headlines

A headshot of the creator of Headlines, Brad Purchase

Hi there! My name is Brad Purchase. I'm a software engineer based in Toronto, Canada, and I'm the creator of Headlines. Right up top, I want to thank you so much for checking out the project and reading this to learn more about it!

Headlines is a passion project of mine that I've been thinking about and working on for over a decade. It seems wild to say that, but it's true: I've owned the domain headlines.fm since ~2013, and for all those years I've wanted to use it to build a reader app that made reading content on the web a truly great experience - something I enjoy using every day. After so many attempts and on-and-off development cycles on this project, I feel extremely proud of this project today. I am delighted to put it out into the world for anyone to use, and I'm dedicated to working on it and improving it for years to come.

I've been an RSS user since the Google Reader days, and like many enthusiasts, I was saddened when it shut down and have been looking for a replacement for years. I've bounced around to many feed readers that are out there, and while most of them are solid, I was never able to re-capture the vibe Google Reader gave me back in those early days. Worse, a lot of them require subscribing to a separate service for crawling feeds, and they can be rather expensive.

I felt like there was an opportunity for an app that fixed this problem by:

  • Providing a great reader app and a great crawler service all in one affordable package
  • Appealing to a wider audience by abstracting away the nerdy details - what if folks who don't even know what RSS is could get value out of a service like this?
  • Sweating the details on every aspect to provide a great experience on mobile and web, and also provide browser extensions for popular browsers

As you can imagine, nailing the above points is a large feat, especially for a solo developer with a full time job. That could be why this version of the Headlines project took roughly four and a half years, which also seems bizarre to say, but building a feed crawler service, a web app, an iOS app and two browser extensions all from scratch takes time, and I'm super glad I sweat the details because I'm very proud of it today and learned a ton throughout the process.

Headlines is an app that I love to use, which is weird to say about something you built, but it's true. By putting this out into the world, I hope people like you love it too! If you give the app a shot and have any feedback, please email me at brad@headlines.fm - I'd love to chat.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read about Headlines! See you out there on the web.