Turn RSS feeds into a weekly newsletter draft
Every Monday, the week's posts from your favorite sites are collected, summarized by AI, and emailed to you as a ready-to-edit newsletter draft.
What you need
- 3 to 10 RSS feed links (most blogs and news sites have one)
- An OpenAI API key
- Gmail to receive the draft
Steps
List your feeds
Collect the RSS links of the sites you follow. Tip: many sites have their feed at /feed or /rss.
Run weekly
Schedule the automation for Monday morning.
Collect last week's items
Read each feed and keep only items published in the last 7 days.
Summarize with AI
Send titles, links, and descriptions to OpenAI. Prompt idea: "Pick the 5 most useful items for beginners. For each, write a headline, two plain-English sentences, and the link. Add a one-line intro."
Email the draft to yourself
Send the result to your own inbox. Copy it into beehiiv (or your newsletter tool), edit, and schedule.
Build it in your tool
Schedule weekly. RSS > Retrieve RSS feed items (one module per feed, or an iterator over a list), Tools > Text aggregator, OpenAI > Create a completion, Gmail > Send an email.
Schedule Trigger, Set (your feed list), Split Out, RSS Read, Filter (last 7 days), Aggregate, OpenAI, Gmail (Send).
RSS by Zapier > New items in multiple feeds, Digest by Zapier (release weekly), ChatGPT/OpenAI step, Gmail > Send email.
- n8n workflowDraft file: it imports into n8n (checked with n8n 2.43) but has not been run with real accounts yet. In n8n: create a workflow, open the menu, choose Import from file, then connect your own accounts.Download .json
- Make blueprintComing once this recipe has been built and tested in Make. Follow the Make notes above for now.Not yet
What it costs per month
| Tool | Monthly usage | Cheapest plan that fits |
|---|---|---|
| MakeCheapestPricing page | 240 credits How we countedPer run: 5 feed reads + about 50 items through the aggregator + AI + email, roughly 60 credits. x 4 = about 240. This one is an estimate; check the run history after the first week. |
FreeFree plan |
| n8nPricing page | 4 executions How we countedOne execution per weekly run. |
$24/moCloud Starter plan$20/mo billed yearlyOr $0 for the software if you self-host the free Community Edition (you pay for your own server). |
| ZapierPricing page | 8 tasks How we countedTrigger and Digest are free. 4 releases x 2 actions (AI, email) = 8. |
$29.99/moProfessional 750 plan$19.99/mo billed yearlyMulti-step Zap, so the free plan (two steps only) doesn't work. |
Assumption: 5 feeds, about 50 new items a week, runs 4 times a month. Prices in USD, checked 2026-10-17 on the official pricing pages. The plan shown is the cheapest that covers this recipe alone; if you run several automations, add their usage together.
This recipe uses OpenAI. The AI usage is billed separately by OpenAI on your own API key and is not included above. See OpenAI API pricing.
Watch out for
- Some feeds only include a title and no description. The AI summary will be thinner for those.
- Always link to the original source and add your own take. That's what readers subscribe for.