Coming soon — a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox

Your browser's new tab, but it actually has something worth reading.

Lumen is a calm, magazine-style RSS feed reader that lives in the blank page you open forty times a day — full of the writers and sites you actually chose. No algorithm. No account. No ads elbowing in.

The Lumen reader in dark mode: a sources sidebar with folders and unread counts, an article list with thumbnails and read times, and an open article in a wide serif column.

The Lumen new tab in dark mode: a centered greeting, a search bar, site shortcuts, and a magazine-style grid of today's articles with cover images.

the reader, lamp mode — sources · list · article, all in one tab

01 — why we're building this

A short, honest pitch.

Here's the thing about a new tab: you open it more than any other page on the internet, and it gives you back nothing. A search box. Maybe some thumbnails of sites you visited last Tuesday. It's the most valuable real estate in your browser, and it's a parking lot.

Meanwhile, the good stuff — the newsletters, the niche blogs, the one researcher who posts twice a month and is always worth it — is scattered across a dozen inboxes and feeds you keep meaning to check. You don't need another app for that. You need it to be where you already are.

So that's Lumen. Open a tab, and there's your reading: today's unread pieces from the sources you picked, laid out like a quiet front page. Click one and read it right there, in a clean serif column with a read-time estimate and nothing tugging at your sleeve. Done? Open another tab and get on with your day. The reading comes to you, instead of you going hunting for it.

Underneath, it's just RSS — the open, thirty-year-old web standard that never went away. We just made it feel like it was designed this decade.

02 — what you get

Six reasons this beats your current tab.

None of them involve the word "supercharge."

№ 1

Subscribe to anything in one click.

On a site you like? Tap the toolbar icon and Lumen sniffs out its feed — RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, even a raw OPML file. Or right-click any page and add it. Shortcuts for Reddit, YouTube, Substack, and Hacker News are built in.

№ 2

Reading that respects your eyes.

A proper serif, a measured column, generous line-height, and a "4 min" label so you know what you're getting into. Warm paper by day, lamplight by dark — and the dark mode loads with zero white flash.

№ 3

Tags that sort themselves.

Write a tag in plain English — "is about climate," "mentions a launch" — and Lumen's AI files new articles under it automatically. Bring your own OpenRouter or Straico key; pick any model; nothing is sent anywhere without your say-so.

№ 4

Yours, locally, no account.

Everything lives in your browser. No sign-up, no server, no reading-habits dossier on someone else's cloud. Your API key is encrypted with AES-256, and every kind of data sharing is opt-in — and revocable.

№ 5

It keeps itself fresh.

Feeds sync quietly in the background on your schedule. The toolbar badge shows your live unread count, a thin progress bar tracks every refresh, and old articles tidy themselves away — except the ones you've saved.

№ 6

Leave whenever you like.

Import your existing subscriptions from any reader via OPML — folders intact — and export them back out the same way, any time. Lumen earns your mornings; it doesn't lock them in.

03 — a feel for it

Built for hands that never leave the keyboard.

Three resizable panes — sources, list, article — that remember exactly how you left them. Collapse the lot for a full-width read. And the shortcuts you'd hope for are already there:

J next article
/ search your articles
Alt ⇧ L subscribe to the current page
Esc back to the quiet

04 — where we stand

A few things we've decided not to budge on.

No algorithm.

Your feed is the sources you chose, newest first, every feed getting a fair share. Nothing is "surfaced." Nothing is "for you." It already is.

No account.

There is no Lumen server to sign into, because there is no Lumen server. Install it, add a feed, read. That's the whole onboarding.

No selling your attention.

We don't sell your reading data — we never see it in the first place. The AI features run on your key, with your consent, against your rules.

No hostage-taking.

Open standards in, open standards out. If a better reader comes along someday, your OPML export is one click away. We intend to make sure it doesn't.

The next tab you open could be the best thing you read today.

We're polishing the last corners now. Leave your email and you'll be among the first to try it — and the first to tell us what we got wrong.