RSS Feed Reader - Any RSS/Atom Feed to JSON

Turn any RSS 2.0 or Atom feed into clean, structured JSON: one row per item, ready for a spreadsheet, a database, or an AI agent's context window. Give it your own feed URLs — a news site, a job board, a podcast, a blog, a changelog — and get back title, link, publish date, author and summary for every item, in seconds, with no login and no browser.

Built for automation/no-code workflows (n8n, Make, Zapier) that need an RSS-to-JSON step instead of running their own parser, researchers and analysts who track many feeds and need one consistent schema across all of them, and AI agents that need to hand a feed URL to a tool and get structured items back instead of raw XML.

This Actor never scrapes a website — you bring your own feed URLs. There is no source to break, no ToS to worry about, and no proxy involved: just an HTTP fetch and a standards-based feed parse (RSS 2.0 and Atom, both handled).

What you get

• One row per feed item, not one blob per feed — title, link, published (ISO 8601 UTC), author, summary (HTML stripped), categories and podcast-style enclosure_url/enclosure_type, so downstream filtering and sorting is trivial.
• Both RSS 2.0 and Atom parsed with the same schema — mix a WordPress RSS feed, a Substack Atom feed and a podcast RSS feed in one run and get identical rows back.
• Errors instead of crashes — a bad URL, a 404, a timeout or a non-XML response becomes a single unbilled error row (error, errorMessage), and the rest of your feed list keeps going.

Sample row

A real row from a default run against BBC News:

{
  "feed_url": "https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml",
  "feed_title": "BBC News",
  "id": "https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq5xjlvn71lo#1",
  "title": "UK economy grew faster than expected in July",
  "link": "https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq5xjlvn71lo?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss",
  "published": "2026-09-11T07:45:18+00:00",
  "updated": null,
  "author": null,
  "summary": "The economy expanded by 0.4%, official figures show, whereas economists had predicted no growth.",
  "content": null,
  "categories": [],
  "enclosure_url": null,
  "enclosure_type": null,
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-11T07:55:32+00:00"
}

Items are sorted newest first across every feed you supply, combined into one dataset.

Filters

Input	Default	What it does
feedUrls	We Work Remotely + Hacker News + BBC News	Your own RSS 2.0 or Atom feed URLs.
maxItemsPerFeed	100	Stop after this many items per feed, in the feed's own order.
includeContent	false	Add the item's full content (RSS content:encoded / Atom content) to every row, not just the short summary. Off by default to keep rows small — most feeds only publish a summary anyway.
newerThan	unset	Optional ISO 8601 date; items published before it are dropped. Items with no parseable date are always kept.

No personal data beyond the feed's own byline

The only person-identifying field is author — and only when the feed itself publishes a byline (a blog post's author name, a podcast host). Nothing is inferred, looked up or enriched; you get exactly what the feed already makes public. Free-text fields (summary, content) are the feed's own published text and may contain whatever the publisher wrote, such as a job posting's contact address.

Pricing

Pay per event, no subscription: $0.50 per 1,000 items. A default run (3 feeds, ~145 items) costs about 7 cents. Error rows (a dead feed URL) are never charged. If every feed in your list fails, the run is marked failed rather than quietly returning nothing, and you are billed for nothing.

Use it from your tools

• API and SDKs — call it via the Apify API or the official Python/JavaScript clients: one call to start the run, one to fetch the item rows as JSON, CSV or Excel.
• n8n, Make and Zapier — trigger runs and feed the items into a workflow through Apify's integration for each.
• AI agents and MCP — eligible for agentic use via Apify's MCP server with pay-per-event pricing, so an agent can hand it a feed URL mid-task and pay only for the items it actually got back.

Details

• Fetching: plain httpx GET over http/https only (no proxy, no browser). Requests are capped at 20 MB and time out after 30 s; 429 and 5xx responses are retried with exponential backoff (5 tries), 404/401/403 are not.
• Parsing: stdlib xml.etree.ElementTree against both the RSS 2.0 <rss><channel><item> shape and the Atom <feed><entry> shape. A response that isn't recognizable as either becomes an unbilled not_xml error row instead of being handed to downstream code.
• HTML stripping: summary (and content when includeContent is on) has HTML tags removed and whitespace collapsed, so you get plain text, not markup.
• Run stats: the STATS record in the run's key-value store holds per-feed and per-item counts, including items dropped by newerThan.
• Not affiliated with any feed source you point it at — you supply your own feed URLs; nothing is scraped from a website.