feedly-mcp

Read your Feedly subscriptions from Claude. Ask "what's new in my AI feeds?" and get an answer, without opening a browser.

Not published yet. The server works and all six tools have been exercised against a live account, but it is not on npm and there are no releases. Install from source — that path works today; the npx and .mcpb ones do not.

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What it does

Six tools that let an agent read your Feedly account:

Tool	What it gives you
list_folders	your folders, with unread counts
list_feeds	the feeds in a folder
get_articles	recent articles, cleaned up and trimmed
unread_counts	how much is waiting, total and per folder
search_feeds	find new sources to subscribe to
mark_read	mark articles as read (off by default)

What it does not do

This is a connector, not a reader app. It translates a request into a Feedly API call and hands back a clean answer. It does not store your articles, build a searchable archive, rank things over time, or send you digests.

Those are all good things to want — build them on top of this, in a Claude Project, a skill, or a scheduled task. Keeping them out is what makes this small enough to trust.

Privacy

Everything runs on your own machine.

• Your Feedly token stays local. It is never sent anywhere except api.feedly.com.
• No account with us, no server in the middle, no telemetry.
• Nothing about what you read is stored beyond a short-lived local cache.

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Requirements

• Node.js 20 or newer — check with node --version
• A Feedly account and an API token (step 1 below)
• Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or any other MCP client

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Step 1 — Get a Feedly API token

1. Log in to Feedly in your browser.
2. Visit https://feedly.com/v3/auth/dev.
3. Follow the instructions there to generate a developer access token.
4. Copy the token somewhere safe for the next step. It is a password — treat it like one.

Two things to know before you go further.

Tokens expire. On a free account a developer token is valid for about 30 days, after which you repeat this step. Paid plans can refresh automatically. This is Feedly's policy, not something this tool can work around.

Token availability depends on your plan. Feedly's own documentation is inconsistent about which account tiers can self-issue API tokens. If the page above does not give you a token, this connector cannot work with your account, and there is no workaround short of contacting Feedly.

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Step 2 — Install

Build from source — the only path that works today

git clone https://github.com/fredrsat/feedly-mcp
cd feedly-mcp
npm install
npm run build

Then store your token in a file only you can read, so it never has to go into a client config in plain text:

mkdir -p ~/.config/feedly-mcp
printf '%s' 'paste-your-token-here' > ~/.config/feedly-mcp/token
chmod 600 ~/.config/feedly-mcp/token

The server refuses to read that file if it is group- or world-readable, and tells you how to fix it.

Register it with your client, using an absolute path to the built entry point:

# Claude Code — --scope user makes it available in every directory
claude mcp add feedly --scope user -- node /absolute/path/to/feedly-mcp/dist/cli.js

claude mcp list   # should report: feedly ... ✔ Connected

For Claude Desktop, add this to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) or %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json (Windows), then quit and reopen the application — closing the window does not reload MCP servers:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "feedly": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/feedly-mcp/dist/cli.js"]
    }
  }
}

Already have other servers under mcpServers? Add feedly alongside them rather than replacing the block.

If you move the repository afterwards, re-register it — the path is absolute. Rebuilding in place is picked up automatically.

Once published

Neither of these works yet; they are what installing will look like after the first release.

One-click, Claude Desktop. Download feedly-mcp.mcpb from the Releases page and drag it into Settings → Extensions. A settings form appears; the token goes into your operating system's keychain rather than a plain-text file, and everything in Configuration is editable from that form.

From npm. npx -y feedly-mcp as the command, with FEEDLY_TOKEN in the client's env block, or the token file above.

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Step 3 — Check that it works

Before asking Claude anything, confirm the connection from your terminal:

node dist/cli.js doctor

A healthy result looks like this:

✓ Config loaded from /Users/you/.config/feedly-mcp/config.toml
    scope.default_folder = Tech  ← file

✓ Token found        (file /Users/you/.config/feedly-mcp/token)
✓ Connected to Feedly you@example.com
    plan: FeedlyProYearly
✓ 8 folders, 70 feeds

  Tech             70 feeds  4317 unread  user/<uuid>/category/Tech
  Tech - Research  11 feeds    68 unread  user/<uuid>/category/<uuid>
  Tech - Tooling    6 feeds   171 unread  user/<uuid>/category/<uuid>
  …

  API calls used today: 4 of 50   (resets in 11h34m)
  Configured ceiling:   40/day account-wide, 10/session
  Through this server:  4 today, 4 in this run

✓ Everything checks out.

Useful flags: -v prints every resolved setting and where it came from, --refresh clears the cache first.

doctor never prints your token. Use the folder list it gives you when filling in scope in step 4.

If something is wrong, jump to Troubleshooting.

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Step 4 — Configure (optional)

The defaults are sensible and you can skip this entirely. The one setting worth looking at early is scope — which folders Claude is allowed to see at all.

Create ~/.config/feedly-mcp/config.toml:

[scope]
# Only these folders are visible to the agent. Leave empty for all of them.
include_folders = ["AI", "Longform"]

# Used when you ask about articles without naming a folder.
default_folder = "AI"

[defaults]
hours = 8          # how far back get_articles looks
limit = 100        # max articles per call

Two reasons to set include_folders:

• Privacy. Your work folder does not need to be readable by an agent.
• Focus. Fewer folders means shorter answers and less context spent on material you did not ask about.

If you installed via Option A, edit these in the extension's settings form instead — same options, no file to find.

Full list of settings: docs/configuration.md

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Using it

Just ask. Some things that work well:

• "What's new in my AI feeds since yesterday?"
• "Anything worth reading in AI - Research this week?"
• "How many unread articles do I have, broken down by folder?"
• "Find me feeds about local LLM inference"
• "Summarise the top 5 by engagement from the last 8 hours"

You don't need to know folder IDs. Folder names work, and Claude can list them.

Full tool reference: docs/tools.md

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Limits worth knowing before you build on this

These come from running it against a real, busy account rather than from theory.

Volume beats your time window. On a folder producing ~42 articles an hour, asking for 24 hours with a limit of 320 actually covers under eight — limit runs out first. Responses report covered_hours alongside window_hours so the gap is visible, but raising the limit is usually the wrong fix: it costs more quota and more context to move the blind spot slightly. Narrow the folder.

Scope works on folders, not feeds. If one noisy source and one excellent source sit in the same folder, no configuration here separates them — on the account this was tested against, a single feed produced 140 of 320 articles and none of the useful stories, while a feed with 2 articles produced most of them. The fix was unsubscribing in Feedly. Practical order: drop dead-weight feeds first, then set scope. The other way round throws away good sources to escape bad ones.

Counts that report what a write did deserve suspicion. Feedly returns no count for folder-level marking, so mark_read measures unread totals before and after. That is close, not exact — Feedly's own counts lag a moment. For anything that matters, check unread_counts yourself.

A cleanup window older than your backlog marks nothing. Unread settles at roughly window_days × articles_per_day. A 7-day older_than against ~570 articles a day holds the backlog near 4000 forever, however often you sweep.

Budget from the response, not from a plan. Every result carries calls_left_today and calls_left_session. Read them and adapt rather than deciding a call count up front — the daily figure is account-wide, so your own browsing moves it underneath you.

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Your API quota — please read this

Your daily API quota is small — smaller than Feedly's documentation suggests.

Measured against the live API, a developer token on a paid Pro Plus account reports a ceiling of 50 calls per day, resetting around midnight UTC. Feedly's own docs describe 250 on free and 500 on Pro. Plan for 50.

That is roughly eight conversations a day if the agent is chatty, and the quota is shared with everything else touching your account — including Feedly in your browser, which stops working too if an agent drains it.

So this tool defends the budget on your behalf:

• Folder and subscription lists are cached on disk for 24 hours.
• Repeated identical requests within 15 minutes are served from cache.
• One call fetches a whole folder — never one call per feed.
• Hard ceilings at 10 calls per session and 40 per day, leaving headroom for you. The daily one is measured account-wide, so browsing Feedly yourself counts against it — that is deliberate, so an agent cannot lock you out of your own reader.
• Every response reports how much quota is left and how stale the data is. Below 10 calls remaining, you get a warning.

Check your own ceiling with doctor — it prints the limit your account actually reports. If it says something higher than 50, you can safely raise the budget in configuration.

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Marking articles as read

mark_read is permanent. Feedly has no undo, and recovery means emailing their support. So it ships disabled.

To enable single-article marking:

[writes]
enabled = true

To also allow marking an entire folder read in one go — a much bigger blast radius — you must turn on a second switch deliberately:

[writes]
enabled = true
bulk_mark_read = true

Unsubscribing is not implemented at all, on purpose. Do that in Feedly.

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Troubleshooting

doctor says the token is missing

The server looks in this order: the FEEDLY_TOKEN environment variable, then the file named by feedly.token_file. Confirm your token reached whichever one you used — a common cause is editing the config file while Claude Desktop passes an empty environment variable that wins over it.

"Token expired" or 401

Free-account tokens last about 30 days. Repeat step 1 and update the token where you stored it. This is expected and will keep happening; it is not a bug.

Claude doesn't see the tools

Quit and reopen Claude Desktop completely — a window restart does not reload MCP servers. Then check your JSON is valid (a trailing comma is the usual culprit), and that node --version reports 20 or higher.

"Rate limit exceeded" (429)

You have used your Feedly quota for the day. It resets on Feedly's schedule; the error message includes the reset time. The server will not retry automatically — retrying would only dig the hole deeper.

"Daily budget exhausted"

Different from the above: this is this tool's ceiling, not Feedly's, and you still have real quota left. Raise budget.daily_calls if you want more.

A folder is "outside configured scope"

scope.include_folders is set and that folder isn't in it. Add it, or clear the list to allow everything.

Cached data looks like it belongs to another account

Clear the cache and try again:

rm -rf ~/.cache/feedly-mcp

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Development

npm run build      # compile to dist/
npm test           # 104 tests, no API calls
npm run typecheck  # tsc --noEmit

There is also an end-to-end check that drives the built server over stdio as a real MCP client and exercises every tool against your account. It costs a handful of API calls out of the daily 50, and prints the remaining quota as it goes:

node --env-file=.env scripts/smoke.mjs

mark_read is only exercised in its refusal paths, there and everywhere else. It is irreversible, so there is no safe way to test the success path.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests welcome. The design rationale — including which features are deliberately excluded — lives in feedlymcpspec.md. Read it before proposing a feature; if your idea is in the "not in scope" list, that is a decision rather than an oversight, though it is one you are welcome to argue with.

The spec and these docs are the contract. If you change a return shape or a config key, change both together or neither.

License

MIT