The Gratitude Subscriptions, Jenuary 2026

Over the past two years, I’ve started this my virtual subscription to projects for which I express deep gratitude. Projects related to applications I use, or blogs I follow, or podcasts I listen to, and so on. I wrote about them for 2024 and 2025.

This year too I decided to continue with this habit, but unlike other years I decided to write about it (more or less) monthly, so as to be able to dedicate more space to individual projects.

Let’s start in January, albeit a bit late. And in January, I donated my monthly subscription (€10) to Alexandre Alapetite, aka Alkarex on GitHub. Alexandre is the lead developer of freshRSS, which I’ve already written about extensively and which I’m hosting on my self-hosted server.

For those who don’t know it yet and don’t want to click around the blog, FreshRSS is a simple, lightweight, open-source RSS feed aggregator designed to give you full control over your news sources. It offers a fast, customizable interface. I use it to keep my feeds in a private, secure location.

I use it on a client and not directly on the web. Today on SmartRSS, before that on Unread and before that on Reeder Classic. I use it and it always works. Always.

I use it because it makes me feel less tracked, and I feel like I’m protecting one of the most important things I have: the carefully curated, decades-long selection of my information sources.

All my gratitude to you, Alexandre.