Sunsetting Perch
After almost two years of trying to build the best reading app in the world, we have made the difficult decision to wind down the company. We wanted to share our thinking before we move forward.
We built something with Perch that a core group of users genuinely love. But we've concluded that the market opportunity isn't large enough to sustain the product long-term, and we don't have a credible path to change that.
Our Original Thesis
Our original thesis was that reading on the internet should work like podcasts. Creators publish to open RSS feeds, and a rich ecosystem of clients aggregates that content into one great user experience — similar to how Spotify and Apple Podcasts work. The explosive growth of newsletters (Morning Brew, The Skimm, 1440) and writing platforms like Substack, Beehiiv, and Ghost seemed to confirm that the content supply was finally reaching critical mass. We also believed improvements in AI text-to-speech would meaningfully expand the addressable market.
What Changed
Two headwinds made a sustainable outcome feel out of reach:
1. The long-term decline of reading. As Steve Jobs put it more than a decade ago, “People don't read anymore.” We thought trying to reverse that trend would make the work meaningful. But even our most intellectually curious friends found it hard to read a long-form article when social media was one tap away. There are other data points as well. The founders of Instagram and Goodreads were unable to solve this problem with products like Artifact and Smashing. Substack itself seems to be doubling down on Notes and video. And Beehiiv has repositioned from a newsletter platform to an “operating system for the content economy.”
2. The best writers are moving to closed networks and paywalls. We hoped the newsletter boom would revitalize the open RSS ecosystem that made blogging work in the early web era. Instead, the opposite is happening. LLM scraping and plagiarism have pushed many publishers toward Cloudflare and similar tools that block content indexing. Others have migrated to closed networks like X, which has both loosened its character limit and locked down its API. And an increasing number of traditionally free writers have moved their writing behind paywalls. When the best writers abandon open protocols, an aggregator doesn't work — just as Spotify would collapse if top artists weren't available on the platform.
What This Means for You
Perch will shut down on March 31st, 2026 and all active subscriptions will be refunded.
If you'd like a copy of your followed publications, saved posts, or playlists, email us at team@perch.app and we'll get that to you.
While we still believe in the promise of reading on the internet that inspired us to start this company, we don't have a plausible plan to overcome these headwinds. Rather than let the product slowly degrade, we'd rather be straightforward with the people who supported it.
To everyone who used Perch, purchased a subscription, shared it with friends, or sent us feedback that made it better — thank you. You made this the most meaningful work of our careers.
Mike & Matt