RSS, Atom & JSON Feed Reader

Parse public RSS, Atom, RDF/RSS, and JSON Feed URLs into a predictable, bounded dataset for apps, automations, and AI agents.

What this Actor does

• Accepts 1–100 public feed URLs in one run.
• Detects RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0/RDF, Atom 1.0, and JSON Feed 1.0/1.1.
• Normalizes common item fields without inventing missing values.
• Preserves input order while fetching feeds concurrently.
• Writes one success or error summary for every requested feed.
• Isolates feed-level errors so one bad source does not discard the rest of the batch.

Common uses include scheduled news, blog, podcast, and release monitoring; RSS-to-JSON normalization for n8n, Make, or Zapier; bounded source ingestion for AI/RAG workflows; and diagnosing malformed feeds.

Input

{
  "feedUrls": [
    "https://www.w3.org/blog/news/feed/",
    "https://hnrss.org/frontpage"
  ],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 50,
  "includeContent": true,
  "minimumPublishedAt": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z"
}

Field	Type	Default	Purpose
feedUrls	string array	required	1–100 public HTTP/HTTPS feed URLs
maxItemsPerFeed	integer	100	Maximum items returned after filtering
includeContent	boolean	true	Include full content supplied inside the feed
minimumPublishedAt	ISO 8601 string	none	Keep items on or after this date; undated items remain with a warning
timeoutSeconds	integer	20	Per-request timeout, from 1 to 30 seconds
maxRedirects	integer	5	Maximum redirects, from 0 to 10
maxResponseBytes	integer	2000000	Maximum response body per feed
maxConcurrency	integer	4	Concurrent requests, from 1 to 10

Output

Each normalized item is followed by one summary for its feed. Missing source fields are null; the Actor does not fabricate titles, authors, dates, or content.

Item example:

{
  "recordType": "feed_item",
  "schemaVersion": "1.0",
  "status": "ok",
  "feedIndex": 0,
  "itemIndex": 0,
  "feedFormat": "rss2",
  "feedTitle": "Example updates",
  "id": "release-42",
  "url": "https://example.com/releases/42",
  "title": "Release 42",
  "publishedAt": "2026-08-25T12:30:00Z"
}

Summary example:

{
  "recordType": "feed_summary",
  "schemaVersion": "1.0",
  "status": "ok",
  "feedIndex": 0,
  "requestedUrl": "https://example.com/feed.xml",
  "feedFormat": "rss2",
  "itemsSeen": 20,
  "itemsEmitted": 20,
  "itemsFiltered": 0,
  "warnings": []
}

Pricing

• Actor start: US$0.00005 once per run.
• Feed parsed: US$0.002 for each successfully parsed feed, including all emitted item and summary records.
• A failed feed has no feed-parsed charge.
• Platform usage is included in the event price.
• There is no per-dataset-row charge.

The Actor checks the run spending limit before making network requests and reduces the batch when the remaining limit cannot cover every requested feed.

API and agent use

Run the Actor from Apify Console, REST API, schedules, tasks, or webhooks. After publication under eligible pay-per-event settings, Apify can also expose it to MCP clients. For larger batches, prefer an asynchronous run plus webhook or dataset retrieval instead of keeping a synchronous request open.

Safety and privacy

• Public HTTP and HTTPS feeds on standard ports only.
• No credentials, authentication, cookies, browser, proxy, or JavaScript execution.
• Localhost, private, link-local, reserved, and cloud-metadata destinations are blocked.
• DNS is pinned for each connection; every redirect destination is resolved and checked again.
• Response size, redirects, timeout, concurrency, feed count, and item count are bounded.
• DTD and XML entity declarations are rejected.

Use only feeds you own or are authorized to access.

Limitations

This Actor does not crawl linked articles, render JavaScript, bypass access controls, discover feed URLs from websites, persist cross-run deduplication state, or read authenticated feeds and custom ports.

Troubleshooting

• UNSAFE_URL: the destination, redirect, port, credentials, or a DNS answer violates the public-network boundary.
• HTTP_STATUS: the source returned a non-success HTTP status.
• RESPONSE_TOO_LARGE: lower the source payload or keep the 2 MB safety ceiling.
• INVALID_FEED: the response is not a supported, parseable feed.
• Missing content: some feeds publish only a title, summary, or link. The Actor returns null rather than crawling the article.

Failed feeds still produce a visible error summary and are not charged as feed-parsed events.