Balanced Breakfast.

When it comes to media and news, it's good to be a picky eater.

A local-first, extensible feed reader for people who read with intention.

Balanced Breakfast is a native desktop feed reader that puts you in control. Subscribe to RSS, Hacker News, arXiv, and any source you can script. Everything stays on your machine. No account required, no telemetry, no cloud dependency. Built with Rust and Tauri for speed and a small footprint.

4 Built-in sources

∞ Custom via plugins

9 Bundled themes

0 Telemetry & tracking

What You Get

Multi-Source Timeline

RSS, Atom, and JSON Feed (1.0/1.1)
Hacker News: Top, New, Best, Ask, Show, Jobs
arXiv papers by category (cs.AI, cs.LG, etc.)
Reader view with article extraction
Everything in one unified feed

Rhai Plugin System

Write custom source adapters in Rhai script
Dynamic config forms (text, URL, secret, select)
Pagination, search, auth capabilities
Plugin secrets encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM)
No recompilation needed to add sources

Reading & Organization

Three-panel layout: sources, items, detail
Mark read/unread, star/favorite items
Feed tags and per-source filtering
Full-text search across all content (FTS5)
Sort by date, score, unread-first, starred-first

Data Ownership

All data in local SQLite — no cloud required
OPML import and export
Optional E2E encrypted cloud sync (SyncKit)
URL tracker stripping (utm_*, fbclid, gclid)
Content-addressable storage (no duplicates)

Keyboard-Driven

jk Navigate items

s Star / unstar

r Toggle read

/ Search

o Open in browser

Esc Close panel

⌘R Refresh all

⌘N Add new feed

⌘I Import OPML

Built-In Plugins

📡 RSS / Atom

Subscribe to any feed URL. Multi-URL support, tag extraction, JSON Feed compatible.

💬 Hacker News

Browse Top, New, Best, Ask HN, Show HN, and Jobs. Score metadata and pagination.

📄 arXiv

Track papers by category. cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.CL, cs.CV, stat.ML, and more.

📖 Reader View

Extract clean article content from any web page. Readability-style rendering.

Write your own. Plugins are Rhai scripts — a lightweight, sandboxed scripting language. Define a fetch function, a config schema, and you have a new source. Host functions for HTTP requests, XML/JSON parsing, and text processing are built in. A full authoring guide ships with the app.

Query Feeds

Build saved filters with multiple conditions. Match on title, author, body, source, tag, or status. Supports contains, equals, and regex operators. Live match counts show how many items hit each query. Think of them as virtual feeds that pull from everything you subscribe to.

Under the Hood

Auto-fetch every 15 minutes (configurable per plugin)
Circuit breaker: auto-disables feeds after 10 consecutive failures
Feed health monitoring with failure counts and last-error display
Stale item cleanup (read, non-starred items older than 30 days)
Duplicate detection on OPML import
HTML sanitization on all rendered content
9 bundled TOML themes + user custom themes + high-contrast mode
Paginated item loading (50 at a time, load-more)
Toast notifications for fetch errors and status updates

Cloud Sync (Optional)

Sync feed configs, read/star state, and preferences across devices via MNW SyncKit. End-to-end encrypted — the server never sees your data. Feed content re-fetches from source on each device, so only your state crosses the wire. No account required to use the app — sync is entirely opt-in.

How It Compares

Feature	BB	Feedly / Inoreader	NetNewsWire	Miniflux
Custom source plugins	Yes	—	—	—
HN + arXiv built-in	Yes	—	—	—
Native desktop	Yes	—	Yes	—
Cross-platform	Yes	Yes	Apple only	Yes
No account required	Yes	—	Yes	—
Free, no limits	Yes	Freemium	Yes	Self-host
Zero telemetry	Yes	—	Yes	Yes
Full-text search	Yes	Paid tier	Yes	Yes
Saved query feeds	Yes	Paid tier	—	Yes
Mobile app	—	Yes	Yes	Web only

Free during alpha. Balanced Breakfast is a native desktop app. macOS ready today, Windows and Linux via Tauri. Source-available under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0.