Why Monfil exists

Every morning I opened the same tabs. The release pages of the tools I depend on. A few engineering blogs. Hacker News. Two newsletters. A social feed that showed me what it wanted, in the order it wanted. When I had checked them all, an hour was gone, and I still missed some of what that mattered.

Feed readers fixed half of the problem. Most of them did not follow non-RSS mediums, such as GitHub releases, arXiv or conferences and job boards well, and I had to hunt for feed addresses before I could read anything. So I built the reader I wanted. I called it Monfil: “mon fil” means “my feed” in French.

A radar for your field

Monfil is for people who must keep up: engineers, security people, researchers, founders, people who look for their next job. You put the sources of your field in one place, and Monfil checks them for you. Unread counts and saved searches show you where something new happened, so you read what matters and close the app.

You pick the sources, from many platforms

Your field does not live on one website. It lives in blogs, release notes, papers, videos, posts on Bluesky and Mastodon, and the job boards of the companies you watch. Monfil reads all of them, and you paste the link of the page you already read. Monfil finds the feed. No algorithm decides what you see. Items arrive newest first, from the sources you chose, and nothing is ranked, boosted or hidden. If a source stops being useful, you remove it.

Your reading stays on your computer

I'm a strong believer in digital hygiene and privacy. Monfil has no account and no Monfil server. Your feeds, your read state and your saved articles live in a database on your computer, and you can back it up or take it with you as an OPML file. Anonymous usage stats are helpful for guiding the development, but they are off unless you agree (the app shows you exactly what it would send).

Built in public

The code of Monfil is public, under the Business Source License, and each version becomes MIT four years after its release. The test coverage, the mutation scores and the changelog are public too. You do not have to trust a promise about quality. You can read the numbers.

Try it

Monfil is free on macOS, Windows and Linux. Start with a feedpack for your field and your river fills in a minute. If Monfil helps you keep up, tell me. If it does not, tell me why: write to hello@monfil.app or open an issue on GitHub.

Théo