RSS Feed Scraper & Monitor - RSS to JSON

A 15-result test run with the default input (Hacker News front page) costs about $0.02 ($0.0015 per result, plus a $0.00005 start fee). Apify's free plan includes monthly platform credit.

Turn any RSS or Atom feed into clean JSON, CSV or Excel. Point it at news sites, blogs, product changelogs, release notes, job feeds or podcasts, and get one structured row per item. Turn on change detection and each scheduled run returns only the items that are new since the last run, so you can build news monitors, alerts and AI-agent pipelines without writing a feed parser.

No login, no proxy, no browser. It fetches only the public feed URLs you give it.

What it does

• Parses RSS 2.0 and Atom, with the format auto-detected per feed.
• Reads many feeds in one run and writes a per-feed summary.
• Normalizes the fields: title, link, guid, description (plain text), author, categories, ISO publishedAt, plus optional full HTML content.
• Change detection (onlyNewSinceLastRun): remembers each item's guid or link in a named key-value store, so you pay only for new items.
• Keyword filter on title and description keeps noisy feeds cheap.

Use cases

• News monitoring: track mentions of your brand, competitors or topics across news and blog feeds, and send new matches to Slack or email.
• RSS to JSON API: give your app, database or AI agent clean JSON from any feed, on a schedule or on demand.
• Changelog and release tracking: watch vendors' release notes and status pages that publish RSS.
• Content curation: fill newsletters, Discord or Telegram channels and dashboards with fresh items.
• Research datasets: archive feed items over time for analysis.

Input example

{
  "feedUrls": [
    "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
    "https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml"
  ],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 25,
  "keywords": ["AI", "open source"],
  "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true,
  "includeContent": false
}

Output example

{
  "feedUrl": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
  "feedTitle": "Hacker News: Front Page",
  "feedFormat": "rss",
  "title": "Launch HN: Laminar (YC S24) – We trained a model to catch silent agent failures",
  "link": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154029",
  "guid": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154029",
  "description": "Hi HN, we're Robert and Din from Laminar...",
  "author": "skull8888888",
  "categories": [],
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-19T16:00:18.000Z",
  "isNew": true,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-19T17:07:15.273Z"
}

Fields: feedUrl, feedTitle, feedFormat, title, link, guid, description, author, categories, publishedAt, isNew, scrapedAt, plus content when includeContent is true. The key-value store record SUMMARY holds item and new-item counts for each feed. Export to JSON, CSV or Excel, or connect webhooks, Google Sheets, Slack, Zapier, Make or n8n.

Pricing

Pay per result: $1.50 per 1,000 items delivered (result event, $0.0015 per item). Apify also charges a tiny Actor-start event ($0.00005 per run per GB of memory). Items skipped by change detection or keyword filters are not charged.

Examples:

• Hourly monitor of 10 feeds with change detection and about 100 new items a day: about $0.15 a day.
• One-off export of 5 feeds × 25 items: about $0.19.

FAQ

How do I find a site's RSS feed? Look for an RSS icon or a /feed, /rss or /atom.xml URL, or check the page source for <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml">. Many news sites, blogs, YouTube channels, Reddit and GitHub releases publish feeds.

How does change detection work? Item guids (or links) are stored in the key-value store named by stateStoreName. The first run outputs everything and sets the baseline, and later runs output only unseen items. Rename the store to start fresh.

How often can I run it? As often as you like. Use an Apify Schedule (e.g. hourly). Each run takes only a few seconds.

Does it support JSON Feed or podcast enclosures? JSON Feed isn't supported yet. Podcast RSS works for titles, links and dates, but enclosure fields aren't modeled yet.

Can it scrape sites without a feed? No, it reads RSS and Atom feeds only. Fetch only feeds you're allowed to access, and respect each publisher's terms.

Not affiliated with any feed publisher.

Use from an AI agent

You can give this Actor to an AI agent as a tool through the Apify MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com), from Claude, Cursor, VS Code and other MCP clients. Add the server with only this Actor loaded:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=monriah-studio/rss-feed-monitor"
    }
  }
}

On first connection your browser opens to sign in to Apify (OAuth). Or add "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer <APIFY_TOKEN>" } to use your API token instead. Then ask your agent something like "Summarize today's top Hacker News stories".

You can also call it directly via the Apify API, for example to run it and get the results in one request:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/monriah-studio~rss-feed-monitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
  "feedUrls": ["https://hnrss.org/frontpage"],
  "maxItemsPerFeed": 15
}'

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• Bluesky Mentions Monitor: brand, keyword and hashtag mentions on Bluesky, with engagement, sentiment and only-new alerts.