RSS Feed Monitor - New Items Only

Schedule this Actor on Apify (or trigger it from n8n / Make / Zapier) and it will watch your RSS and Atom feeds, then return only items published since the last run.

Schedule hourly for news, daily for blogs, via Apify Schedule or n8n/Make/Zapier.

Try it: https://apify.com/technicaldost/rss-feed-monitor/examples/watch-hn-and-bbc-new-items

The first run takes a small sample (maxItemsFirstRun) and marks the rest of the feed as already seen, so a daily schedule is never billed for the backlog. After that you pay only for genuinely new items.

Connect the dataset to Slack, Discord, Google Sheets, or an LLM summarizer. This is a drop-in RSS API alternative for newsrooms, SEO teams, and competitor changelog monitoring.

What does RSS Feed Monitor do?

It polls the RSS / Atom / podcast URLs you provide, stores per-feed seen identifiers in a named key-value store, and emits only new items. Unchanged feeds return an empty dataset and incur no item charges.

It does not crawl full websites. It only reads the feed document.

Why use a scheduled RSS monitor?

• Fire Slack or n8n alerts when a blog, changelog, or newsroom publishes
• Feed only fresh articles into summarization or classification pipelines
• Watch competitor blogs and release notes without rolling your own deduper
• Track podcast feeds for new episodes

Apify Schedule, webhooks, and the REST / MCP APIs mean you can run this unattended.

What data can it extract?

Field	Type	Description
title	string	Item title
link	string	Permalink
publishedAt	string	Publication time when the feed provides it
summary / content	string	Description and optional full body
dupScore	number	sklearn TF-IDF cosine to previously seen titles (near-dup)
topicLabel	string	Keyword / TF-IDF topic
feedUrl / feedTitle	string	Source feed

How to monitor RSS feeds

1. Open Try for free and keep the prefilled Hacker News + BBC News example.
2. Set maxItemsFirstRun (default 10) so the first run is a cheap baseline.
3. Create an Apify Schedule (hourly or daily) or an n8n/Make HTTP node.
4. Map dataset items to Slack, email, or a spreadsheet.
5. Optional: call the Actor from MCP with the same JSON input.

How much does it cost?

Pay per event, not a subscription. Actor start is $0.002 (scaled with memory, one event per GB). Each new item is $0.01. Unchanged feeds do not create item charges. Always confirm the live Pricing tab before a large run.

Input

See the input tab for the full form. feedUrls is required. includeContent adds the feed-provided body. stateKey lets you start a fresh baseline.

Example:

{
  "feedUrls": [
    "https://news.ycombinator.com/rss",
    "https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml"
  ],
  "maxItemsFirstRun": 10,
  "includeContent": true
}

Output

Download the dataset as JSON, CSV, HTML, or Excel. Near-duplicate titles get a dupScore close to 1.0 so you can drop them in n8n.

{
  "feedUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/rss",
  "title": "Example headline",
  "link": "https://example.com/item",
  "dupScore": 0.12,
  "topicLabel": "technology",
  "isFirstRun": true
}

MCP

This Actor can be called from the Apify MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com). Use actor technicaldost/rss-feed-monitor with the JSON above.

FAQ and support

Public feed contents can include personal data published by the site. Use results only for legitimate purposes. Open the Issues tab for bugs. Use the API tab for programmatic access.