About

Where it came from

I built Siftdeck because newsletters were arriving on their schedule, not mine. I'd subscribed to the good ones — real writing from people who know their topics — and then watched them pile up in an inbox I only opened when something urgent came in. The reading I'd intended to do kept getting crowded out by everything else the inbox contained.

What I actually wanted was to sit down with an iPad and a coffee and work through a queue of things I'd actively chosen to read. A good read-later app is excellent for that — clean layout, offline access, a reading experience you've customised. The problem was getting the right articles there without the inbox noise following them in.

So I built an intake layer. Siftdeck pulls articles out of your newsletter sources and presents them for a decision: save to your read-later app with tags, mark as read, or skip. The queue drains. Only the things you actively chose reach your reading list.

The sift model

Most read-later tools let you add things to a pile. I wanted the opposite — a model that asks you to make a call on each article before it goes anywhere. That's what the sift queue is. Articles come in, you work through them, each one gets a decision. Nothing lingers. Nothing creates guilt.

You can sift a single source when you have five minutes — just the articles from one newsletter — or sweep everything at once. Either way, you leave with a clear head and a reading list that contains only what you genuinely want to read.

What it does differently

  • Global deduplication. Articles are stored once, globally. If the same link appears in two newsletters I follow, I see it once. No duplicates to dismiss.
  • Direct dispatch. When I save an article, it goes straight to my chosen destination with whatever tags I've assigned. Tags keep the reading list organised without extra effort.
  • Auto-suggested tags. Siftdeck looks at the article URL and suggests tags from my library. I confirm or change them in a second.
  • Sequential source tracking. For newsletter archives with numbered issues, Siftdeck detects the pattern and fetches new issues automatically as they're published.

Siftdeck doesn't try to be your reading app. Your read-later app already is. We just make sure the right articles get there.