The press kit

The facts

App

The Lede, listed on the App Store as "The Lede: Read Later"

Developer

Charles Klein LLC

Platform

iPhone and iPad, iOS 26 or later

Categories

News (primary), Productivity

Price

Free to start: ten briefs and two Dig Deepers a month, no account. Membership is $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, each with a 7-day free trial and 150 Dig Deepers a month; subscriptions auto-renew until cancelled.

Availability

App Store in the United States, Australia and Singapore

Release date

September 14, 2026

App Store link

apps.apple.com/app/id6772315315

Press contact

charles@theledeapp.com

Website

theledeapp.com

What The Lede is

This section is written to be quoted. Use it verbatim or cut it down.

The Lede is a read-later app for iPhone and iPad with a research desk behind it. It works in two steps: hear the author out, then see what the sources say.

Save anything worth reading, from Safari, any app with a share button, or by pasting a link. It comes back renamed for what it actually argues and filed on its beat, with the headline it ran under kept beside it and a short brief that makes the strongest honest case the piece can make. Your queue reads like a magazine instead of a pile of open tabs.

Then Dig Deeper sends the desk back out. It reads the reporting and research around the piece, sets out what others found and where it lands, and lists every source it wrote from, each link opening the original. It can get one wrong, so it asks you to check the ones that matter to you. You’re the editor. The Lede is your research desk.

It's built to be read: real typography and a dark mode made for reading at night.

The receipt

The rename is the feature most likely to raise an eyebrow, so here is what keeps it honest. The desk renames every article by what it actually argues, and the original headline is preserved right beside the rename, labeled RAN AS, exactly as it ran. The full article is kept on the reader's own device and stays readable, quotes stay verbatim, and every link opens the source. Nothing is swapped behind the reader's back; they never have to take the desk's word for anything.

The point is to make what an article argues clear, so you can decide whether it’s worth your time at all.

The demonstration that leads the App Store listing: "A glass of red wine equals an hour at the gym" comes back as "It was run on rats."

Dig Deeper on the same story, the sample that ships in the app, finds the study’s lead author saying it used no red wine.

Who made it, and why it charges

Charles Klein is a designer. He built The Lede because he got tired of headlines that bury the story, or sell one that isn't there, and because the read-later app he wanted didn't exist: one that reads what you save instead of storing it. It's native SwiftUI, built with Claude Code and finished by hand.

Why a subscription: every brief and every Dig Deeper is real compute, spent on one reader's one article. There are no ads, no trackers, and nothing is sold; the membership pays for the desk. The free tier is real: ten briefs a month with no account and no card, and two Dig Deepers a month are free so anyone can try the desk at full stretch.

Where it sits

Readwise Reader, Matter, GoodLinks, and Folio are the established read-later apps, and they are good at what they do: they store and reformat what you save, and some of them will answer questions about a piece once you have it open. The Lede reads every article on the way in, unasked, and renames it in the queue by what it argues, so the work happens before you open anything. That is the whole difference, and it cuts both ways: if what you want is a beautifully formatted archive, those apps have years of head start. If you want to know what a piece actually argues before you give it twenty minutes, that is what The Lede is for. On iPad it is a real iPad app, not a stretched-out iPhone layout.

Privacy, in plain terms

Every sentence here matches the Privacy Policy, which carries the binding detail.

• The app has no account: no name, no email, no password. A reader's library lives in their own iCloud, not on our servers.
• The app hosts no web view of its own and owns no cookie store, so a capture cannot leak a reader's signed-in session off the device.
• Sharing from Safari, the normal path, reads only the page the reader already had open, as they see it. A link shared from another app is fetched and read by the desk itself.
• Article text is sent to our AI provider to write the brief; our contract bars model training on your text.
• A Dig Deeper's notification is pushed only to the device that asked for it.
• No ads, no third-party trackers, nothing sold.

Assets

Download the press kit (zip, 19.6 MB)

The iPhone and iPad frames follow the App Store listing, in listing order, with the app shown in the device: iPhone frames are 1320 by 2868, iPad frames 2064 by 2752. The iPhone Duo frames are below. Every article in them is a real piece the desk read, credited to its publisher. Everything here is free to reproduce in coverage of The Lede, so far as the rights are ours to grant; please don't recolor or re-draw the icon.

The film

A short film about The Lede: 80 seconds, its words set on paper one line at a time, with sound and no music. It's free to use in coverage of The Lede, whole or in part, and so are stills from it. Please don't change its words or drawings, reorder it, or set it to music.

Download the film (MP4, 1080p, 6.7 MB) · Download the poster frame (PNG, 55 KB) · Read the film's words

iPhone frames

iPad frames

iPhone Duo frames

The Lede is ready for iPhone Duo. Open, the queue and the story sit side by side, like an iPad you can fold; closed, it reads like any iPhone. The open frames are 2853 by 2007 and the closed ones 1398 by 2034, the sizes App Store Connect takes for iPhone Duo. Each one shows the device itself.

Icon & card