📰 Universal RSS Feed Parser | $1/1K | Any RSS/Atom/RDF Feed

Parse any RSS 2.0, Atom, or RDF feed and get structured article data: title, link, author, date, content, categories, media. Works on millions of blogs, news sites, podcasts, Substacks, Medium publications, YouTube channels.

✨ Key Features

• 📋 3 formats supported: RSS 2.0, Atom, RDF (RSS 1.0)
• 🔁 Batch feeds — fetch 100s of feeds in parallel
• 🧹 HTML stripping — clean plain text for AI / search indexing
• 🏷️ Full metadata — author, date, categories, enclosures (podcast MP3s)
• 🖼️ Media extraction — thumbnails, enclosures, media:content
• 📡 Podcast-aware — handles iTunes namespace
• 🔒 Zero API keys

Input

Single feed

{
  "feedUrls": ["https://hnrss.org/frontpage"]
}

Bulk news aggregator

{
  "feedUrls": [
    "https://techcrunch.com/feed/",
    "https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml",
    "https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index"
  ],
  "maxItems": 50,
  "stripHtml": true
}

Medium / Substack publications

{
  "feedUrls": [
    "https://medium.com/feed/@user",
    "https://example.substack.com/feed"
  ]
}

YouTube channel as RSS

{
  "feedUrls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCxyz..."
  ]
}

Input Parameters

Field	Type	Required	Description
feedUrls	string[]	✅	RSS/Atom/RDF feed URLs
maxItems	int	❌	Limit per feed (0 = all). Default: 100
stripHtml	bool	❌	Plain text (true) or preserve HTML (false). Default: true
extractFeedMetadata	bool	❌	Include feed title/description on each item
maxConcurrency	int	❌	Parallel feed fetches (default: 5)
timeout	int	❌	HTTP timeout per feed (default: 20)

Output

One dataset row per item:

{
  "success": true,
  "feedUrl": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
  "feedTitle": "Hacker News: Front Page",
  "feedLink": "https://news.ycombinator.com/",
  "feedDescription": "Hacker News RSS",
  "feedLanguage": "",
  "title": "Show HN: I built a thing",
  "link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=...",
  "guid": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=...",
  "pubDate": "Sun, 11 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000",
  "author": "username",
  "description": "Short summary here",
  "content": "Full article content...",
  "categories": "Show HN, Software",
  "comments": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=..."
}

Use Cases

🤖 AI Agents / LLM Pipelines

• Feed fresh content into GPT/Claude for summarization
• RAG systems monitoring industry news
• Automated briefing generation

📊 News Aggregation

• Build a niche news site pulling from 50 sources
• Slack/Discord digest bots
• Daily email digests (Make/Zapier + this actor)

🎙️ Podcast Monitoring

• Extract podcast episodes with audio URLs (enclosures)
• Feed transcription pipelines
• Build podcast discovery sites

📰 Medium / Substack Tracking

• Follow competitor newsletters automatically
• Aggregate industry thought leaders

🎬 YouTube Channel Tracking

• YouTube offers RSS feeds per channel (/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=)
• Get new video notifications without YouTube API quotas

🔍 SEO / Content Research

• Analyze competitor publishing frequency
• Content gap analysis

Pricing

• $0.001 per item ($1 per 1,000 items)
• Pay only for items actually parsed
• Broken feeds skip cleanly — no charge

How it works

1. HTTP GET the feed URL
2. Detect format (RSS 2.0 / Atom / RDF) from root element
3. Parse items/entries with namespace-aware stdlib XML
4. Extract title, link, date, author, content, categories, media
5. Optionally strip HTML from content for clean text

Uses Python's built-in xml.etree.ElementTree — no third-party dependencies, fast cold starts.

Notes

• Works on any public feed — no auth
• Some feeds rate-limit aggressive re-polling (respectful defaults)
• Malformed XML feeds return an error per feed, other feeds continue
• Some feeds only return last 10-20 items regardless of maxItems

Pro tips

• Automation: Apify Scheduler → every hour → Zapier → Slack = real-time news bot
• YouTube RSS: use /feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<id> for any YouTube channel (free, no API)
• Substack: append /feed to any Substack URL
• Medium: medium.com/feed/@user or medium.com/feed/publication-name
• Podcasts: iTunes podcast URLs have RSS feeds — find them via https://podcastindex.org