The decentralized cross-device sync works surprisingly well! It's a great app with no ads, minimal but attractive UI, a nice reader mode. The closest successor to Press reader.
Their free is pretty much just "you get to use a very limited amount of our features, to try em out" and the limited amount is still pretty generous.
I've been using them for a very long time, since before the free was actually an option, and have to say they're absolutely the best RSS aggregator I've found
Big shout for FreshRSS. No issues with privacy (you self-host on a simple PHP/MySQL server), and you can do as many filters as you like (instead of paying for it on feedly). then get an android reader like FeedMe that supports the FreshRSS stream and you're golden!
Fwiw, I'm pretty sure mine is just SQLite db. I set it up a bit ago but don't remember a big db install. Granted it's mainly me and just a couple others at most so that should be fine.
Read You is a beautiful app with material you design. Works great, but the tiny thumbnails, and the fact that not all thumbnails load (whereas in Feeder they do) is my major point of complaint. Still I like using it.
Hands down my favorite right now is this website where you can setup feeds to send you the entire article into your email. You can also do digests of a weeks or days worth of rss feeds. It's super reliable and just perfect for my use case.
I like that the Android app is open source and available on F-Droid and that self hosting is an option, so I pay for premium so I don't have to deal with the hassle of self hosting while I support the developer!
An excellent choice. I do the same with Home Assistant - I COULD set up a wireguard/Tail scale connection to HA, but Nabu Casa works great and supports the developers so they can do more cool stuff like voice assistants so I can finally get rid of the AmazonEars in my house.
I use Feedly but many websites only show a extract and I need to go direct to their website, I'm guessing this is a limitation impsoed by site owners... Is there any "perfect client" for this?
Some readers like Feeder allow you to click into the article with a simplified Reader view. Next best thing to having the full content in the RSS entry itself
For years I've used Feedly, but recently tried "Feeder" on Android. I like the minimalist and no ad aspects. Even better it has a "fetch full article" function that works even for some paywalled sites. - downside is no website.
Commafeed
free and open source, web-based, can be self-hosted
When Google Reader died, I went to search for it's alternatives, and Commafeed was the only one that used 100% of screen width.
This is my choice as well. Sadly it has long since stopped getting updates - while basic RSS features will always work, hoping Feedly integration keeps working.