Dusk light through a channel between two sea stacks at Pfeiffer Beach, Big Sur

Made for the Mac

A Mac RSS reader that’s a library, not an inbox.

Whole articles from the feeds you follow, kept on your Mac: offline, searchable, yours until you delete them. No account. No subscription.

Download Cove Beta

Free forever · Requires macOS 15 or later.

View release notes
Cove’s three-pane reader in light mode: a sidebar of feeds and folders, an article list, and a full article open in the reading pane of one native macOS window.
The reader in light mode: library, article list, and the article itself, in one native window. Shown as a detail crop on small screens.

The problem

The web forgets.

Feeds truncate to a teaser and a link. Blogs die and take their archives with them. Most readers quietly delete old articles to save space. The article you know you read last year is gone.

Cove starts from a different premise: what you choose to subscribe to is worth keeping.

Full articles

The article, not the teaser.

When a feed sends only a preview, Cove fetches the rest when it can, so the whole article is waiting in the reader instead of behind a browser tab.

Two views of the same article side by side: the feed’s short excerpt on one side, and the full article in Cove’s Reader View on the other.
The same article twice: the feed’s excerpt beside the full text Cove fetched on this Mac. Shown as a detail crop on small screens.

Two ways to read

One toggle flips between the publisher’s layout and a clean reading view.

Honest when it can’t

Paywalls and broken pages happen. Cove shows the preview and a link to the original instead of dressing a teaser up as the article.

Code reads like code

Technical articles arrive full of code, and Cove renders it properly: formatted, highlighted, matched to light and dark.

Your archive

Read it once. Keep it.

What Cove saves stays saved: never auto-deleted, yours until you delete it.

Cove’s sidebar with the Archived section selected, listing articles kept from a removed feed, restorable any time.
The Archived section: articles kept from feeds you’ve removed, ready to browse or bring back. Shown as a detail crop on small screens.

Unsubscribe without regret

Removing a feed offers to keep its articles in your Archive, one click from coming back.

Find it again in seconds

Search article text, titles, authors, and feed names, offline.

No lock-in, in either direction

One click imports subscriptions and folders from any OPML-compatible reader. One click exports them if you ever leave.

Clips

Keep the sentence, not just the article.

The archive keeps the article. Clips keeps the sentence. Select a passage, save it, and it joins a library of clips, each one a click from the spot it came from.

Cove’s Clips section selected in the sidebar, listing saved passages from several feeds with their source article, author, and date, two of them carrying a note, and the reading pane showing the selected clip’s article scrolled to the highlighted passage.
The Clips library: saved passages, newest first, with the source article open at the one you’ve selected. Shown as a detail crop on small screens.

Still there when you come back

Reopen the article and your clips are highlighted where you left them.

Find it by what it says

Clips searches your saved passages and notes. Each clip takes one note and copies out with its citation.

Kept, even when the page changes

An article with a clip is never removed automatically. If a passage can’t be found again, Cove keeps your words and your note and says so.

Set aside

Unread that ebbs.

Your RSS reader isn’t a to-do list. Set older unread articles aside and they stop counting against you: still unread, still in their feeds, marked so you can see why. Nothing is marked read. Nothing is deleted.

Cove’s Unread list with older set-aside articles sitting in their own place in the timeline, each marked with an open dotted circle beside its title, among ordinary unread rows.
Older articles set aside in the Unread list: still unread, never deleted, still exactly where they were. Shown as a detail crop on small screens.

Listen

Read to you, by your Mac.

Cove reads articles aloud with voices that run on your Mac. Finish the long read while you cook, tidy up, or rest your eyes.

An article open in Cove and being narrated aloud: the paragraph being read is highlighted, and a compact playback bar with pause, skip, speed, and progress floats over the reading pane.
An article mid-narration: the paragraph being read is highlighted, and the compact player floats above the text. Shown as a detail crop on small screens.

  • Works the moment you install

    Cove starts reading with the voices already on your Mac. Optional voices download once and run offline.

  • Follow along, or drift

    The paragraph being read is highlighted as the voice moves. Pause and skip from the player, your media keys, or your headphones.

MCP

Open to your agent.

Cove has a built-in MCP server, so an agent on your Mac can ask your library what is new, read an article, and tidy your subscriptions. It is off until you turn it on, and it answers only on this Mac.

You: tell me about my latest articles in cove

Agent: You have 136 unread across 9 feeds. Daring Fireball is 108 of them.

The newest, from the last two days:

  • Robin Sloan, “My question is simply…” (Sep 9), a lab post about the iPhone.
  • John Gruber, “The iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro” (Sep 9), a full review piece, not a link.
  • John Gruber, “SuperDuper 4” (Sep 8), another full piece, on the backup app.
  • Robin Sloan, “One-way doors” (Sep 8).
  • Luca Rossi, “My agents are moving to the cloud” (Sep 8), an essay on cloud coding agents.

Also worth a look from Sep 6 and 7:

  • Gruber’s long piece, “And It’s True That I Stole Your Lighter…”

Want me to pull the full text of any of these, or mark the Daring Fireball backlog read?

An agent on the same Mac, asked what is new. Every answer came through Cove’s local MCP server.

Reads freely, changes carefully

An agent can list your feeds, fetch unread or starred articles, read one in full, mark articles read, and add, rename, move, or remove feeds. Your clips are not on the menu.

Works with any agent

Any agent that speaks MCP can connect. Copy one configuration block from Settings and start asking.

An honest comparison

Where Cove fits, and where it doesn’t.

Cove is a Mac-only reading archive: no iOS app, no sync. If you need mobile or cross-device access, another reader is a better fit today.

NetNewsWire

Free and open source, with iCloud and service sync. Cove keeps the article text on your Mac.

ReadKit

RSS and read-later accounts in one app for iOS and macOS.

Feedly

An account-based news reader for iOS and Android.

The full comparisons, including Reeder, Inoreader, and Readwise Reader.

Before 1.0

One thing is coming before 1.0. It doesn’t ship in the current beta.

On-device AI. Because it’s 2026.

Narration already runs entirely on your Mac; what follows keeps the same rule. Optional on-device AI for your reading library, on compatible Macs.

Fair questions

Asked by people who read the fine print.

Is Cove really Mac-only?

Yes. Mac only, with no iPhone or iPad app. If you mostly read on your phone, Cove isn’t for you yet.

What about sync?

There’s nothing to sync to: Cove has no cloud service and no second platform. Your library lives on one Mac.

What does “beta” mean here?

The heart of it is complete and stable for daily reading. Beta means the 1.0 feature set is still landing and some edges are rough. The download is notarized by Apple, and updates arrive inside the app.

What will 1.0 cost?

Not decided yet. Cove is free forever. Join the release list above and you’ll hear the terms when they’re real.

More questions, including privacy, search, and disk space, on the FAQ page.