XS NEWS

This axis needs the tier named or it is meaningless. The €2.95 Basic 50 plan is hard-capped at 50 Mbit/s. That is not a fair-use threshold but a fixed ceiling, and it is the price the marketing leads with. Our bench ran the uncapped tier on 20 SSL connections and saw 508 to 528 Mb/s: respectable, flat, and below the leaders mainly because we were working with fewer connections against a Dutch endpoint. Read the tier before you read the number, on this provider more than any other here.

Advertised at 4,000+ days, with 3,000+ appearing in older material: a narrower spread than most of this board manages, and consistent with a network that runs its own spool and knows what is on it. Retention is depth, not completeness. Four thousand days is comfortably above the Dutch independents and several years short of the UsenetExpress and Omicron archives, which places XS News as a strong current-material provider rather than an archival one.

XS News owns Abavia and runs it on multiple 100 Gbit/s uplinks out of Amsterdam. That is genuine operator status and the strongest thing on the page. The practical corollary is the one that matters when you go shopping: HitNews rides Abavia and Frugal Usenet’s primary feed rides Abavia, so those three are one network wearing three brands. Pair XS News with a UsenetExpress or Omicron feed and you have real redundancy; pair it with HitNews and you have two invoices.

Claimed at 99.8%, which is among the highest figures on the board and comes from a company that owns the spool it is describing. That is worth slightly more than the same number from a reseller, since there is nobody else to blame for it. In our checks current and recent material came back clean. Completion is the share of requested articles that arrive; beyond roughly four thousand days the failures are expiry rather than loss.

reader.xsnews.nl with a us.reader variant, on SSL 563 and 443, enforced, with non-SSL not promoted at all, which is the right posture and rarer than it should be. Fifty to a hundred connections depending on plan, and up to two hundred on block accounts, which is the highest block connection count here. The Amsterdam datacentre is its own; the US presence is documented more thinly.

Netherlands primary with a US endpoint: better reach than the EU-only independents, though the US route is the less documented of the two. No APAC, no documented IPv6. XS News also explicitly markets EU-law protection from US authorities, so the geography here is part of the product rather than an afterthought.

Strong, with one piece of nuance that the marketing rounds off and we will not. The good part: 256-bit TLS enforced rather than optional, GDPR rights clearly documented, Dutch notice-and-takedown jurisdiction, and an explicit argument that EU law shields the data from US authorities. The nuance: the privacy policy states that Usenet activity is logged by Abavia acting as data processor. One third-party report calls this zero logging. The policy-accurate reading is that XS News does not log, and processing happens at Abavia, which is a meaningfully different sentence, and the one to base a decision on.

None, and XS News states plainly that a VPN is not required for secure Usenet. That is a defensible position rather than a dodge: the NNTP session is encrypted end to end, and a VPN’s job is hiding that the session exists from your ISP rather than protecting what it carries. The axis scores low because the feature is absent. The reasoning behind its absence is sound.

The broadest lineup in the market, and not close: Visa and Mastercard, PayPal, iDEAL, Sofort, Giropay, Bancontact, SEPA, Paysafecard, KBC and Belfius, plus Apple Pay and Google Pay. Crypto appears in one report and is not confirmed. Advertised August 2026: Basic 50 at €2.95/mo (speed-capped), Pro at €5.00/mo, Elite/Unlimited at €4.95 to 7.50/mo with seasonal discounts that renew at the base rate. Blocks 100 GB to 5 TB, non-expiring. 14-day money-back, a 5-day trial, and a pause-subscription feature that nobody else here offers. Genuinely useful if your downloading is seasonal.