RSS to Newsletter: 3 Ways to Turn Feeds Into an Email Issue

TL;DR

There are three real answers to "rss to newsletter": an RSS campaign inside your email platform, a Zapier or n8n workflow, or a ranked brief a person still picks from. Route 1 automates fetch, format and send for one feed, and sits on a paid plan or add-on at most of the platforms we checked. Route 2 automates anything you're willing to wire and maintain, including an AI summary, but forgets everything between runs. Route 3 automates all of that except the pick, which is the part a curated newsletter is actually selling.

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Everyone typing "rss to newsletter" wants a robot: feeds in, email out, no Sunday. There are three ways to get that, they automate different things, and the one thing you probably should not automate is the pick.

If RSS is new to you, a feed is a machine-readable list of a site's latest items — title, publish date, link, and usually some kind of summary. Most blogs, YouTube channels, subreddits and podcasts publish one whether they advertise it or not.

We make Writesy, which is route 3 below, so discount that section accordingly. Every vendor fact links to the page it came from with the date we read it.

Before any of the three routes

All three start in the same place, and step 2 decides what route 1 is even capable of sending for you.

Step 1: Find the feeds

List every source you'd want to appear in an issue, then get a feed URL for each one. Most sites declare their feed in the page head, so a checker can read it instead of you guessing at /feed or /rss — our RSS feed finder reads the declared feed, probes the common paths when nothing is declared, and knows the per-platform rules for Substack, Ghost, YouTube, Reddit and Medium. It also builds a Google News feed for a topic. For a site with no feed at all, the feed finder's walkthrough covers the Google Alerts route: create the alert at google.com/alerts, then click the RSS icon next to it on the alerts list.

Step 2: Check what the feed actually carries

Paste each feed URL back into the same tool and read what comes out — title, date, link, summary. An RSS campaign can only send what the feed carries, and feeds vary more than people expect. Many carry a one-line excerpt, some carry the full post, and some carry little more than a title and a link. Better to find that out before you've built a newsletter on top of it.

Step 3: Decide who picks

The fork, and it's a question about your newsletter rather than about tooling. One feed, your own blog, going to your own list — route 1 was built for that. Many feeds and you're content for everything new to go out — route 2. Many feeds where a person decides what makes the issue, which is what most people mean by "curated", is route 3.

Route 1: an RSS campaign inside your email platform

The oldest answer. Your email platform polls one feed on a schedule, drops the new items into a template and sends. Mailchimp calls it an RSS campaign, beehiiv calls it RSS to Send, Buttondown calls it RSS-to-email. Same shape underneath.

Mailchimp's help page describes it as a way to "automatically share new posts to your contacts", sending "based on a recurring schedule you choose" — "Daily, weekly, or monthly" (mailchimp.com, checked 2026-09-10). The constraints are the useful part. "We won't send RSS emails unless there's something new to share." "RSS automations will only send once per day." "You can't control the RSS content via the email builder." A post has to be published "at least 3 hours before the automation is set to send" to make that send, and without the RSS merge tags in the template "your emails will deliver without content." The page doesn't state which plans include it, so plan availability is not stated rather than free or paid.

Everywhere else it's a plan line. Kit puts "RSS Campaigns" on Creator, "$33/mo" or "$390 billed yearly", described as a way to "automatically create and send emails when you publish new blog content and your RSS feed updates" (kit.com/pricing, 2026-09-10). MailerLite gates "RSS campaigns" to Power, "Starting $25/month" (mailerlite.com/pricing, 2026-09-10). beehiiv puts "RSS to Send" on Max, "$96/month" (beehiiv.com/pricing, 2026-09-10) — the rest of that ladder is in our beehiiv alternatives piece. Buttondown is free for the first 100 subscribers and sells "RSS-to-email support" as a "+$9/month" add-on (buttondown.com/pricing, 2026-09-10); its feature page says it will "automatically turn any RSS feed into a beautiful email newsletter", "every day, every week, or every month", and that "We'll fetch new posts automatically" and "We'll send them to your subscribers" (buttondown.com/features/rss, 2026-09-10).

So it automates the fetch, the formatting and the send, indefinitely, without you in the loop.

Merging thirty sources into one issue isn't what these pages describe; each one talks about a feed, singular. None of them describe collapsing duplicates across sources, and the only memory any of them mentions is Mailchimp's "something new to share." It sends whatever the feed carries, which loops back to step 2: an excerpt feed makes an excerpt newsletter, and there's no builder step where you fix that.

Right answer when the newsletter is your own blog going to your own list. Real, common case, and the other two routes would be overkill for it.

Route 2: a Zapier or n8n workflow

The builder's answer. A trigger fires on a new feed item, an optional AI step writes a one-line summary, and the result goes out as an email or lands as a draft in your ESP.

n8n lists "12,149 workflow automation templates" and the RSS-to-AI-to-newsletter ones are marked "Free" (n8n.io/workflows, 2026-09-08), so you usually start from someone else's template. Zapier's RSS-and-email path has a hard cap: "Send up to 5 emails per day on Free or Trial Zapier plans, or up to 10 emails per hour on paid Zapier plans" (zapier.com, 2026-09-10). Add a $20/mo chat plan for the summary step and you have most of a system for roughly $20 a month.

It automates anything you're willing to wire, summary included, and no feature list stands between you and what you want.

What it doesn't have is memory. Each run is "new since the last poll", computed from scratch. The same story picked up by four of your feeds arrives four times, and nothing knows what you already sent unless you build a store for it and maintain it. When a feed quietly changes shape the workflow keeps running and produces something wrong, which is worse than an error.

Right if your newsletter is a digest where everything genuinely goes out, or if you enjoy the maintenance. Some people do, honestly.

Route 3: a ranked brief where you still pick

Worth describing generically before any product name. Something polls all of your feeds, collapses items that are obviously the same story, ranks what's left against what you already sent, and hands you a list. You go down it clicking use or skip. Your picks become the draft issue, and it goes out on the email provider you already pay for.

Nothing in that loop chooses a link. The automation stops one step short on purpose.

Writesy is ours and it's this shape, so read the next bit accordingly. The brief is anchored to when you last shipped an issue rather than to the last seven days, so a three-week gap gets covered as a three-week gap, and rebuilding the brief doesn't move that anchor. The same story arriving from several sources collapses into one row using a story fingerprint. Anything you used or skipped stops resurfacing — the memory is the last 500 decisions. Ranking is arithmetic: weight × recency × pillar × novelty × engagement, deterministic, no embeddings, and it never picks. Every row keeps the source link and a verbatim quote pulled from the page, plus a take box that starts empty and stays empty until you write in it. The free curated newsletter section demo shows that block — paste a few links, get the verbatim quote and the empty take for each, rendered the way the studio renders it.

A brief costs 0 credits with quotes only, up to 3 if you want AI one-line summaries on the rows. Turning the picks into an issue costs 0.

Sources go past RSS: any site URL with feed discovery, YouTube channels, subreddits, Google News topics, Apple Podcasts, a Google Alerts feed you already made, a per-newsletter inbox address you forward other people's newsletters to, and a Chrome clipper — an unpacked extension you load yourself, not a Web Store install. Feeds refresh every six hours, so none of it is real time.

Then it hands off. Mailchimp, beehiiv, Kit, Ghost and MailerLite take an API push; Substack is a copy-the-HTML path. Scheduling is opt-in per newsletter, and where a plan can't schedule it says so instead of pretending — Mailchimp Free can only take a draft, and you get a reminder email. beehiiv only accepts posts from outside tools on plans that include its Send API, which is Max. Free is one lifetime brief and 5 feeds, Solo is $19/mo, and Professional at $39/mo is the tier with the provider push.

It automates the fetch, the merge, the dedup, the ranking, the quote, the formatting and the hand-off. It refuses the pick and the take.

The three routes side by side

Job	ESP RSS campaign	Zapier / n8n	Ranked brief
Fetches feeds on a schedule	Yes	Yes	Yes, every 6 hours
Merges many feeds into one issue	Not stated; each page describes a single feed	Yes, if you wire it	Yes
Collapses the same story from several feeds	Not stated	Only if you build it	Yes, story fingerprint
Knows what you already sent	Only "is this item new"	Only if you build it	Yes, last 500 decisions
Writes the summary	Sends what the feed carries	Yes, via an AI step you add	Optional one-liners, up to 3 credits
Picks the links	No — everything new goes out	No — everything new goes out	No — you do, deliberately
Sends the email	Yes	Yes, via Zapier email or your ESP	No — your provider does
Typical cost	Kit $33/mo · MailerLite $25/mo · beehiiv $96/mo · Buttondown +$9/mo · Mailchimp not stated	~$20/mo chat plan; n8n templates "Free"; Zapier free caps at 5 emails/day	Free: one brief · Solo $19/mo · Pro $39/mo

When automating the pick is the wrong answer

A curated newsletter is paid attention. Somebody subscribed because they'd rather have your reading than their own, and the artefact they're paying for is the shortlist. Automate the shortlist and you've removed the product while keeping the packaging.

Forward-everything is a feed reader with a stamp on it. Fine when it's honest about being that, and plenty of good digests are — but it stops being the thing people forward to a colleague.

The practical version of the argument is that picking is where the hours go. Two people described the problem on Reddit during a sweep we ran on September 8, 2026, quoted verbatim with usernames left off:

"Every sunday I have spent 3 to 4 hours scanning 30+ RSS feeds, X accounts, podcasts, arxiv papers, etc. picking, summarizing, digesting into my issue, and formatting markdown." — weekly tech newsletter, around 4,000 subscribers

"Curation was 71% of it." — on where the hours in an issue actually go

Neither of those is a sending problem, which is why route 1 doesn't touch it. If your newsletter's content matrix leans on curated links, the bottleneck is reading, and the honest move is to make the reading faster rather than hand the judgement to a model. Before choosing a route, the newsletter time audit is worth running — sometimes the answer comes back "formatting", in which case route 1 solves your problem.

FAQ

What does RSS to newsletter mean?

It means turning the machine-readable feed a site publishes — its latest posts, with titles, dates and links — into an email your subscribers receive. The narrow version, usually called RSS to email, is one feed republished to your list on a schedule. The broader version pools many feeds into one curated issue, a different job needing a different tool.

Can I send an RSS feed to email for free?

Partly, and the free tiers all cut somewhere different. Buttondown is free for your first 100 subscribers but sells "RSS-to-email support" as a "+$9/month" add-on; MailerLite puts RSS campaigns on Power at "Starting $25/month" and Kit on Creator at "$33/mo"; Mailchimp's help page doesn't state which plans include the feature. Zapier's free plan caps the RSS-to-email path at "up to 5 emails per day". Writesy's free tier is one brief for life and 5 feeds — enough to see the shape, not to run a newsletter on.

How do I find a site's RSS feed?

Most sites declare it in the HTML head, so a checker reads it directly rather than guessing. Our RSS feed finder does that, probes paths like /feed and /rss.xml when nothing is declared, and applies the platform rules for Substack, Ghost, YouTube, Reddit and Medium. If a site publishes no feed at all, the same tool builds a Google News feed for a topic instead.

Can I turn Google Alerts or YouTube into a newsletter source?

Yes, both output RSS. For Google Alerts, the feed finder's walkthrough is: create the alert at google.com/alerts, then click the RSS icon next to it on the alerts list, and use that URL like any other feed. YouTube channels publish per-channel feeds; run one through step 2 first, because a route 1 campaign sends exactly what that feed carries and nothing more.

What is the difference between an RSS campaign and a curated newsletter?

An RSS campaign is automatic republishing: one feed, on a schedule, whatever is new, formatted by a template. A curated newsletter is a person choosing a handful of things out of everything new and saying why they matter. The tooling follows from that — an RSS campaign lives inside your email platform, while a curated newsletter workflow sits before the send and hands the finished issue to the platform you already use.

How this article was verified

Every vendor claim above was read off that vendor's own live page on the date shown beside it and linked at the point of the claim. Where a page didn't answer a question we wrote "not stated" rather than "no" — Mailchimp's help page not naming plan availability is not the same as the feature being free, or paid. No ratings or user counts appear here; we can't verify those. We make Writesy, which is route 3, and we didn't test any competitor's product — the capability statements describe what each vendor publishes about itself.

Mailchimp, Kit, MailerLite, beehiiv, Buttondown, Zapier, n8n, Google and YouTube are trademarks of their respective owners, named here only to identify the products described. None of these companies is affiliated with or endorses Writesy.

If a price has gone stale, the links above are the fastest correction. Related reading: planning a content strategy without tools, which uses an RSS reader for competitor watching.