Newsletters and Paid Subscriptions

Two kinds of source arrive with a secret attached: a newsletter delivered to your inbox, and a paid feed handed out per subscriber. Both work in Feedpik, and both are handled differently from everything else because sharing one would hand over your access.

Newsletters

Feedpik gives you a private email address. Subscribe to any newsletter with it — or forward ones you already get — and they arrive in your reader alongside your feeds instead of burying your inbox.

Find it under Discover Sources → Newsletter, copy it, and use it wherever you would use your own address. Pro plan.

Each sender becomes its own source. A newsletter you subscribe to shows up as a feed you can file, favourite, mute or unsubscribe from like any other, rather than everything landing in one undifferentiated pile.

Senders can be blocked. If something you did not ask for finds the address, block that sender and it stops being ingested. The address itself stays the same — no need to reissue it because one thing got through.

Paid subscriptions

A paid Substack, Ghost or Patreon gives you an RSS link that is yours alone. Paste it under Discover Sources → Paid subscription and it behaves like any other feed, with three differences.

The URL is masked in the interface. You see enough to recognise the source and not enough to copy the secret:

https://example.substack.com/feed/private/•••

It is never included in anything you share. Not in a pack, not in a persona. When you share a persona the result tells you how many private sources were skipped, so you can see it happened rather than trusting that it did.

It never enters the discovery pool. Only shared feeds are eligible for Recommended's pool, and a private feed is structurally excluded rather than filtered — which is also why your newsletters can never surface in a stranger's feed.

What counts as private

Detection is automatic, so you do not have to declare it. A feed URL is treated as private when it carries a personal secret in any of the usual shapes:

• Credentials in the URL — https://user:pass@host/feed
• A secret in the query string — token, key, auth, apikey, secret, subscriber, hash, sig and similar
• A known paid-platform path — Substack's /feed/private/…, Ghost's member RSS key, Patreon's /patreon-rss/…

This errs towards treating things as private. A public feed misidentified as private loses nothing except a place in the pool; a private one misidentified as public would leak a paid subscription, which is not recoverable.

Do not paste a paid link anywhere else

Worth stating plainly: the protections above apply to the feed URL stored in Feedpik. They cannot help with a copy of it you put somewhere else.

If you export a persona, the export is a file on your own machine and it is yours — but treat it the way you would treat the link itself, because it is your subscription in a form someone else could use.

If something looks wrong

Nothing arrives at my newsletter address — check the newsletter actually sent to it (many require confirming a subscription first), and check the sender is not blocked. Feedpik shows how many messages the inbox has received, which separates "nothing sent" from "sent but not ingested".

A newsletter arrives as one big source instead of separate ones — senders are split by the address that sent them. A publisher using a different sending address per issue defeats that; there is nothing to be done at this end.

My paid feed shows no articles — the private link may have been rotated by the publisher, which happens on plan changes and password resets. Get the current one from your account there and re-add it.

I want to check a private URL I saved — it is masked everywhere in the interface by design, including to you. Retrieve it from the publisher rather than from Feedpik.

Newsletter is greyed out — Pro plan. See plans.