News Feed Monitor: new items from RSS and Atom

For PR, content and monitoring agencies that watch many publishers for many clients. News Feed Monitor reads any list of RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 or Atom feeds and, on each run, delivers only the items that are new since the last run, with UTC dates and plain-text summaries.

The job in one line: give it feed addresses, schedule it, and get only the new items in one clean record shape.

What one run costs (pay per event):

Event	Price
New feed item (one delivered item)	$0.0005
Actor start (once per run, Apify's standard fee)	$0.00005

1,000 items cost $0.50. Feed summaries, errors, duplicates and items already seen are free, so a scheduled run where nothing new was published costs only the start fee. A real run on 17 Oct 2026 (one feed, maxItemsPerFeed 10, deltaMode false) took 5.5 seconds, delivered 10 items plus the feed summary and cost a buyer $0.00505.

Quick start

{
    "feeds": ["https://blog.python.org/feeds/posts/default"],
    "maxItemsPerFeed": 10,
    "deltaMode": true
}

Save it as an Apify task and add a schedule (for example every hour or every day). The first run delivers the newest items up to maxItemsPerFeed and marks the rest as seen; later runs deliver only new items.

Output example

A REAL item record from a run of the input above, read on 8 Oct 2026 at 01:56 UTC, unchanged:

{
  "id": "9c00359687fb7ee6f65c",
  "record_type": "item",
  "status": "ok",
  "title": "Python 3.15.0 candidate 3 is here!",
  "link": "https://blog.python.org/2026/10/python-3150-rc3/",
  "guid": "https://blog.python.org/2026/10/python-3150-rc3/",
  "published_at": "2026-10-02T00:00:00Z",
  "summary_text": "Following tradition, a surprise rc3!",
  "source_name": "Python Insider",
  "source_link": null,
  "feed_url": "https://blog.python.org/feeds/posts/default",
  "feed_title": "Python Insider",
  "source_url": "https://blog.python.org/feeds/posts/default",
  "fetched_at": "2026-10-08T01:56:51Z"
}

Each feed also gets one free feed_summary record with feed_format, items_in_feed, items_delivered, duplicates, filtered_out, unchanged_skipped, over_limit, error_type and message. id comes from the feed address and the item's guid (or link), so the same item has the same id on every run.

Input

Field	Default	Meaning
feeds	none	Full addresses of RSS or Atom feeds.
maxItemsPerFeed	50	At most this many items per feed per run (1 to 1,000).
postedAfter	none	Keep only items published on or after this date (YYYY-MM-DD, UTC).
deltaMode	true	Deliver only items that were not in the feed on an earlier run with the same feed and filter.

Three agency use cases

1. Client news alerts. Collect the feeds of the trade press, regulators and partner blogs that matter to each client. An hourly run sends only new items to a sheet, a Slack channel or an email digest through Apify integrations or the API.
2. Competitor and press room watch. Track the press release and blog feeds of each client's competitors. Delta mode means the account team reads only what changed since yesterday, with dates already in UTC.
3. Content curation for newsletters and social. Pull new posts from a list of sources into one table with title, link, date and plain-text summary, ready for an editor to pick from. postedAfter keeps a first run to recent items only.

Limits and what it does not do

• Reads only the feed addresses you give. It never opens article pages and does not search news sites for keywords.
• At most 2 requests per second per host, 30 seconds and 10 MB per feed.
• Obeys robots.txt of each feed host: a disallowed feed is reported blocked, not read. Sites that refuse automated agents also come back as blocked with the HTTP code.
• A feed that redirects to another host is reported host_not_allowed; give its final address instead.
• Feeds with a DOCTYPE or entity declaration before the root element are refused as doctype_refused. Author names are not read into the records.
• In delta mode, new items over maxItemsPerFeed are counted under over_limit, marked as seen and not delivered later.
• Delta state is kept in a named key-value store in your account, up to 5,000 item ids per feed.
• Each publisher's terms decide what you may do with the items; check them before you republish anything.

FAQ

Why did a second run deliver nothing? Delta mode is on and nothing new was published. The feed summary counts the skipped items under unchanged_skipped, and the run cost only the start fee.

Are duplicate items charged twice? No. Items with the same guid (or link) are delivered and charged once per run and counted under duplicates.

Which date formats work? RFC 822 dates with numeric or named zones and ISO 8601; all come out as UTC.

Why is a feed blocked? Its host's robots.txt disallows the address, or the server answered 401, 403 or 429. The feed summary says which.

How do I cap my spend? Set maxItemsPerFeed and a maximum cost per run in the run options. The run stops cleanly when the maximum charge is reached.

Keywords: RSS feed monitor, Atom feed reader, news monitoring for agencies, press release tracker, competitor blog watch, new items only, RSS to Google Sheets