It is expensive, $6/week or $10/week (I don't know the meaning of the difference between their standard and premier access levels), but definitely worthwhile if you share with a whole household or coffeeshop.

The South China Morning Post (scmp.com) is also worth taking a look at it, especially now that it's free. It's not quite the same caliber as the FT and it has less coverage of American news, but it's even further removed from Anglo-American media circles so offers an interestingly detached perspective while still speaking a familiar political and social language.

I just recently renewed my FT subscription, though, after I let it lapse. I had dropped it favor of a SCMP subscription a couple of years ago. The FT price increases were relentless. But I never ended up reading the SCMP much and didn't even realize it had become free until recently. FT lowered their rates slightly, and given recent events I decided to start reading it again.

I'm hesitant to call the FT neutral, though. Their journalistic culture is closer than most to the traditional Anglo-American laissez-faire descriptivist business culture (borderline amoral) that most Anglophone outlets moved far away from long ago. (In all fairness, they moved away from it partly because that culture was and still is often times dangerously indistinguishable from complicity wrt slavery, apartheid, authoritarianism, etc.) It's honest but still elitist. Perhaps being elitist is what has allowed it to stay above the fray better than other outlets like the Wall Street Journal or the Economist.

The FT is also de facto internationalist given it's readership and industry focus, which is why so many commenters in their forums seem to presume they're anti-Brexit. (Also, when did their forums get so popular? Returning after a couple of years, it feels like the newspaper equivalent of Eternal September.)

I guess those things have made them effectively largely neutral on a wide range of topics of interest, especially to American readers. But it also means the FT doesn't do serious investigate reporting, or to analyze issues very deeply, outside of industry pieces. I like to think of the FT as a reflection of the consensus opinion (or lack of opinion, as the case may be) among the international elite. And that reflection doesn't make a lot of sense unless you bring a lot of pre-existing knowledge to the table, including an already decent awareness of historic and current events, and the intellectual culture of that elite. (Which is definitely not the same as the culture of the academic elite, although there's significant overlap.)

To understand what I mean about the FT being elitist and internationalist, people unfamiliar with the FT should know that it's common for high-level politicians like Secretaries of State, Foreign Secretaries, and even Prime Ministers and Presidents; and for powerful businessmen with multinational interests to publish commentaries through the FT knowing that they're quickly reaching an international audience with many in similarly powerful positions as themselves. In order to remain such a neutral outlet the FT is purposefully often very restrained in how they approach various topics. As I insinuated above, occasionally that restraint comes across more as stilted analysis, an awkward omission, or even deafening silence.