RSS Feed Monitor & Parser: New Items to JSON, Sheets, Slack

Give it a list of RSS, Atom or RDF feeds and run it on a schedule. Each run returns only the items that are new since your last run: title, link, publish date, the feed's short summary and its item id. Plug the dataset into Google Sheets, Slack, Make, n8n, Zapier or a webhook for alerts.

Common uses

• News monitoring and keyword alerts: track blogs, Reddit or Hacker News feeds, and get new items only.
• RSS to JSON / CSV / Google Sheets: parse any RSS or Atom feed into clean rows.
• RSS to Slack, Discord or email through Apify integrations, Make, n8n or Zapier.
• Podcast and YouTube channel feeds: get new episodes and videos as they appear.

Example inputs

Paste any of these into the JSON input tab:

Tech news

{"feedUrls": ["https://hnrss.org/frontpage"], "maxItemsPerFeed": 20}

Two feeds at once

{"feedUrls": ["https://hnrss.org/frontpage", "https://www.nasa.gov/feed/"], "maxItemsPerFeed": 10}

Start silent, alert only on new items

{"feedUrls": ["https://www.nasa.gov/feed/"], "startFromNow": true, "stateKey": "nasa"}

What you get

Field	Meaning
type	item for a new item; free status rows otherwise
feedTitle, feedUrl	Which feed it came from
title, link, published, guid	As the feed gives them (dates in ISO 8601)
summary	The feed's own summary, HTML removed, max 500 characters

The Actor reads feeds only. It never opens the article pages and never returns full article text, so you get a pointer to new content, not a copy of it.

Pricing

$0.90 per 1,000 new items (pay per event item). Free (apart from Apify's tiny per-run start fee): feeds that haven't changed (the Actor asks with ETag / If-Modified-Since and most servers answer "not modified"), feeds that can't be read (feed-error rows with the reason), the startFromNow baseline, and the charge-limit row. Set a maximum charge per run and the Actor stops cleanly when it's reached; undelivered items come through on a later run and are never billed twice.

Free-plan accounts can check up to 20 feeds and get up to 25 new items per run to try it out; the run ends with one free row explaining the limit. Paid Apify plans get full results.

Options

• startFromNow: first run records what's in each feed now, for free, so you only pay for items published afterwards. With it off, the first run returns every item currently in each feed (up to maxItemsPerFeed) as new, and those are billed.
• stateKey: keep separate monitors apart. Same key = same memory of seen items.
• maxItemsPerFeed (default 100): newest first; extra new items in one run are skipped.

Good to know

• Item identity is the feed's guid/id, else the link. If a publisher changes an item's guid, it shows up as new once.
• Publisher refresh hints are honored: RSS <ttl> and sy:updatePeriod/sy:updateFrequency, plus HTTP 429 / Retry-After. Until that interval has passed (at most 7 days), the feed is not requested and you get a free feed-skipped-refresh-interval row with nextAllowedAt.
• robots.txt is checked for every feed. Feeds disallowed for crawlers, or whose robots.txt can't be read, are skipped as free rows.
• Only public http/https feeds; private, internal and cloud-metadata addresses are refused. Feeds are capped at 2 MB and 20 seconds.
• Remembered state holds short hashes of item ids, not feed content. The one exception: if your charge limit stops a run, the items not yet delivered (title, link, date, summary, id only; at most 500 items / 512 KB per feed) are kept so the next run can return them first without asking the publisher again.

FAQ

What does it access? Only the public feeds you list, which publishers provide for automated reading, and only if robots.txt allows it. It returns titles, links, dates and the publisher's own short summaries, never full articles. Respect each publisher's terms if you republish anything.

How often should I run it? Hourly or daily suits most feeds. Don't poll more often than the publisher's feed allows; the monitor skips a feed (free) until the refresh interval the feed publishes has passed.