In June 2025, I pulled out the legacy source code for Fever, Shaun Inman’s paid, self-hosted RSS reader released in 2009, and looked at migrating it to a modern stack.
Fever ran on PHP and MySQL in an era when you still bought software, uploaded it to your server, and ran it yourself.
Fever Reborn: Hot view
Fever was $30 at a time when Google Reader was free, but it offered a different way to read, separating must-read feeds from noisy ones, using links across both to surface the stories gaining attention among the writers you followed. This was a smart way to remove the treadmill of the endless unread queue.
Fever Reborn: Kindling view
My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I believe I migrated off Fever in 2011 when Reeder came to macOS. Reeder is a beautiful application and manages RSS feeds itself and syncs across desktop and mobile.
Last June OpenAI Codex was a cloud product built around the o3/codex-1 model. Even with the original source code and my memory of how the interface should feel, the models struggled to migrate a fairly modest application. It felt like a distraction, so I shelved and forgot about it.
Fever Reborn: Saved view
But this week I spent some time in the evenings restoring Fever to its original glory, but this time running on Next.js with Postgres.
Agents used 789 million tokens, equivalent to $329.70 at API prices. Astra and Fable, for planning and review, accounted for 53% of the cost, while Sol and Opus, split across backend and frontend work, used 83% of the tokens and accounted for the remaining 47%.
  Under the hood
Get it here and set it up for yourself.