Today we’re launching Beacon, a reader for the sites and people you choose to follow, on Mac, iPhone and iPad. Bring your RSS feeds and your Mastodon and Bluesky accounts together in one place, then read at your own pace. And when you’d rather read the day than a list, open the Newspaper.
Why Beacon?
Some of the best writing on the web still comes from blogs, newsletters and personal sites, and a lot of good conversation now happens on Mastodon and Bluesky. Following all of it shouldn’t mean handing your attention to someone else’s algorithm.
So Beacon has no ranking, no suggestions and no reason to keep scrolling once you’re done. It shows you what the sources you chose have published, in the order they published it, and then it lets you get on with your day. It’s made for people who’ve kept their own feed lists for years, and for people who are just starting one.
Follow sites and people in one place
Paste a site’s address and Beacon finds its RSS, Atom or JSON feed. Add a Mastodon or Bluesky handle and it arrives as a feed of its own, with no sign-in. Coming from another reader? Bring your subscriptions in with OPML, and take them out again whenever you like. Feed health tells you when a feed has stopped working, instead of letting it fade away unnoticed.
Group feeds into folders, and save any search as a Smart Folder that keeps itself up to date. Save what you want to keep, mute the words you’d rather not see, and let older articles clear away on a schedule you set. Saved articles are never touched.
Made for reading
Articles open in a clean reading view, fetched from the publisher, with the font and size you like. Timeline keeps everything in order and remembers where you left off, so you come back to the article you were reading rather than another pile of unread items. If you’d rather work through what’s unread, Classic is one switch away. And when you’d like to listen instead, Listen reads any article aloud.
Your day, set as a front page
The Newspaper is the part we’re proudest of. Open it and the last day of your feeds is set as a front page: a lead story, the stories that matter most beside it, a section for each of your folders and the rest In Brief. It holds still while you read, and a new edition is set as the day goes on, morning, afternoon and evening, with a week of back issues to return to. With Apple Intelligence, a story that several of your sources ran appears once, with every source beside it, all worked out on your device.
A few things we love
On a long article, ask Siri to summarise it, or ask a question about it. Beacon answers from that article alone, on your device, through Apple Intelligence. When the article doesn’t cover something, it says so rather than guessing.
Beacon is a proper Mac app, with menus, keyboard shortcuts and windows you can arrange how you like, and links open right in Beacon, with ads and trackers blocked. On iPhone and iPad, widgets show your unread count and what’s next, and Siri and Shortcuts can refresh your feeds before you sit down to read. Your subscriptions and reading position sync through your own private iCloud account, and there’s no Wells Code account to make.
Plans and pricing
Every plan includes every feature on Mac, iPhone and iPad, with Family Sharing. Annual is £11.99 a year and Monthly is £1.49 a month, each with a 14-day free trial for new subscribers. If you’d rather not subscribe, Pay Once is £29.99, and it’s yours to keep. There’s more about what Beacon can do on Beacon’s page.
Thank you
Beacon has been in private preview for a while, and the people testing it have shaped it more than they probably know. Their feedback has been generous and genuinely useful. Thank you, all of you.
What’s next
We have plenty more planned for Beacon, and we’ll share it when it’s ready. In the meantime, we’re hard at work on the rest of the Wells Code family. If you’d like to hear about it first, our own feed is a good place to start.
Thank you for reading, and for giving Beacon a try. Happy reading.