RSS Feed Reader: News, Blogs & Podcasts to JSON

Turn any RSS or Atom feed into clean JSON, or just enter a website and its feeds are found automatically. Get the title, link, publish date, summary, full text, categories, image and podcast audio files of every item. Run it on a schedule with Only new items and you have a news, blog or podcast monitor that sends you only what is new.

• ✅ Automatic feed discovery: feeds advertised in the page (<link rel="alternate">), then /feed, /rss.xml, /atom.xml, /index.xml and more; comment feeds are skipped
• ✅ All formats: RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), Atom, podcast feeds (iTunes), Media RSS, gzip
• ✅ Clean text: summaries and full articles (content:encoded) as plain text, HTML optional
• ✅ Images and media: thumbnail or first image, enclosures (MP3, MP4) with type and size, podcast duration
• ✅ Only new items: remembers what each feed returned before, so scheduled runs return only fresh items
• ✅ Filters: keywords (title, text or categories) and "published on or after"
• ✅ No duplicates: the same article in a site's RSS and Atom feed is returned once
• ✅ Light and cheap: 140 items from 8 feeds in 10 seconds at 256 MB in our test; you pay per item returned, a site without a feed costs nothing

Input example

{
    "urls": ["https://www.tagesschau.de/", "https://hnrss.org/frontpage", "https://feeds.npr.org/510289/podcast.xml"],
    "onlyNew": true,
    "keywords": [],
    "publishedAfter": "",
    "maxItemsPerFeed": 20
}

Output example

Real output from a test run:

{
    "title": "On AI writing",
    "url": "https://www.bolkunov.com/p/on-ai-writing",
    "guid": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50171771",
    "published": "2026-10-20T19:55:11.000Z",
    "updated": "2026-10-20T19:55:11.000Z",
    "summary": "Article URL: https://www.bolkunov.com/p/on-ai-writing\nComments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50171771\nPoints: 58\n# Comments: 19",
    "content": null,
    "categories": [],
    "image": null,
    "enclosures": [],
    "duration": null,
    "feedUrl": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
    "feedTitle": "Hacker News: Front Page",
    "feedLink": "https://news.ycombinator.com/",
    "feedLanguage": null,
    "site": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage"
}

Podcast items come with enclosures like { "url": "https://…/episode.mp3", "type": "audio/mpeg", "length": 23456789 } and duration. The OUTPUT record lists the feeds found for each input, how many items each feed had and how many were returned.

Monitoring with "Only new items"

1. Turn on Only new items since the last run.
2. Create a schedule in Apify (for example every hour).
3. Connect the dataset to email, Slack, Google Sheets, Make or Zapier with an Apify integration.

The first run returns the current items and remembers them; later runs return only items that appear afterwards. The memory lives in the key-value store rss-feed-reader-state in your account; delete it to start over.

Pricing

A small fixed price per item returned. Runs with no new items cost almost nothing.

Paid Apify plans pay less: 10% off on Starter, 20% on Scale and 30% on Business and higher plans.

FAQ

The website has no feed. The run notes "No RSS or Atom feed found" for it in OUTPUT and nothing is billed.

Why is content empty for some items? Many feeds only carry a summary. content is filled when the feed contains the full article.

Does it read JSON Feed? Not yet; RSS and Atom cover almost all sites.

More tools from Tidelane Data

• Hacker News Scraper: search, mentions and Who Is Hiring jobs
• Website to Markdown: clean Markdown of web pages for AI, LLMs and RAG
• Audio & Video to Text: speech to text transcription with Whisper
• Research Papers: search PubMed, arXiv and Crossref at once

All our tools: apify.com/tidelane

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Impressum

Levi Griesinger, Tidelane Data
Besigheimer Straße 18
74369, Löchgau, Deutschland
E-Mail: LeviGriesinger@gmail.com