Automation: RSS → Daily Digest

📖 3 min read resourcesautomations Key Info

Pull new items from your RSS feeds each morning, summarize and group them with an LLM, and deliver one tidy digest to email or Slack.

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OverviewHow it worksYou’ll needBuild it in n8nThe AI promptZapier alternativeCostVariations

Stop doom-scrolling feeds. Each morning, this pulls new items from your RSS sources, has an LLM summarize and group them by theme, and sends you one digest — 2 minutes of reading instead of 20 tabs.

How it works

flowchart LR
    A[Schedule<br/>daily 7am] --> B[Read RSS feeds<br/>last 24h items]
    B --> C[LLM summarizes +<br/>groups by theme]
    C --> D[Send digest<br/>Email / Slack]

You’ll need

• A few RSS feed URLs (blogs, newsletters, arXiv, Hacker News, a subreddit’s .rss)
• An LLM key — Flash / Haiku / DeepSeek Flash (runs once a day over many short items)
• Email (SMTP/Gmail) or Slack

Build it in n8n

1. Schedule Trigger → daily at your time.
2. RSS Read node (one per feed, or loop a list) → fetch items.
3. Filter node → keep items where isoDate is within the last 24h.
4. Aggregate node → combine titles + links + snippets into one text blob.
5. HTTP Request → the AI transform node, input = the aggregated blob, system prompt below, max_tokens: 1200.
6. Code node → parse the JSON.
7. Send Email / Slack node → format themes into a readable digest (a Code node can build simple HTML/markdown).

The AI prompt

System prompt:

You build a daily reading digest from a list of articles (title, link, snippet).

Return ONLY valid JSON, no prose:
{
  "tldr": "<2-sentence overview of today's themes>",
  "themes": [
    {
      "theme": "<short theme name>",
      "items": [
        {"title": "<title>", "url": "<link>", "why": "<one line: why it matters>"}
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Rules:
- Group related items under a shared theme; drop near-duplicates.
- Keep "why" to one concrete sentence. Don't editorialize or invent facts.

Zapier alternative

Schedule by Zapier (daily) → RSS by Zapier → New items in feed → Formatter → Text (combine) → Anthropic → Send Prompt → Formatter → Parse JSON → Email/Slack with the formatted digest. (Zapier’s RSS trigger fires per-item; collect with a Digest step or run per feed.)

Cost

10–20 short items ≈ 3–5K input + ~800 output tokens once a day. On Gemini 3.5 Flash ($1.50/$9 per 1M) that’s well under **$0.10/day** (~$2–3/month).

Variations

• Weekly instead of daily for slower feeds.
• Add a relevance filter: tell the model your interests and have it drop off-topic items.
• Pipe the digest into Notebook/Notion as a dated note instead of email.