RSS to newsletter · without the autopilot
Your newsletter should remember what you already sent.
Writesy reads your RSS sources every week, collapses stories carried by two feeds into one, drops what you covered last issue, and hands you a ranked brief. You pick every link. You write every take. It never sends anything on its own.
one brief · 5 sources · no card
- 92
beehiiv launches Agent at SRE 2026
beehiiv.com - 87
Paved raises its publisher minimum to 50,000 subscribers
paved.com2 feeds covered this - 74
Kit moves Creator to $33/mo
kit.comyou skipped this source 3x - 61
Curated stays free to 1,500 subscribers
curated.coalready sent in #9 - 58
n8n passes 12,000 workflow templates
n8n.io
An example brief. The grey tags are the part no other tool produces.
The job
Curation is the work. Everything else is formatting.
Two things operators say about running a curated newsletter, posted publicly on Reddit in 2026. They describe the problem — they are not reviews of this product, and nobody quoted here has used it.
“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.”
“Curation was 71% of it.”
One week
The loop closes on the following Monday.
Set up once by pasting whatever addresses you already have — a YouTube channel, a subreddit, a podcast, a Google Alert, a plain website — and Writesy resolves the feed behind each one. Newsletters you already subscribe to can come in too: every newsletter you run gets its own inbox address. After that the week runs like this. Most tools hand you a blank editor every week and forget the last one existed; this is the part that compounds, because each issue you ship changes what the next brief shows you.
- MON 06:00
A brief lands, anchored to what you last shipped
Writesy fetches every source you added and ranks what is new since your last issue — not the last seven days, the actual gap. Stories carried by two feeds collapse into one row. Anything you already sent is marked and pushed down.
Costs 0 credits with quotes only.
- MON 06:12
You decide. Use or skip, one pass
Every row keeps the source link and a verbatim quote pulled from the page, so you are judging the actual words rather than a summary of them. Your skips are remembered: skip a source often enough and it stops crowding the top.
The model never picks for you.
- WED
Your picks become an issue
One click turns everything you marked Use into a draft issue — the link, the verbatim quote, and an empty box for your take. The box stays empty on purpose. Your take is the reason anyone subscribed. A booked sponsor slot drops into place at the top.
0 credits. No AI call.
- THU
It goes out on your provider, not ours
Schedule the issue through your provider’s own API so the send happens on your account, to your list, under your sending domain. Review-first is the default and scheduling is opt-in per newsletter. On a plan that cannot schedule, Writesy saves the draft and emails you a reminder at the time you picked rather than pretending it went out.
Mailchimp, Kit, MailerLite, Ghost. Or export clean HTML.
- THE NEXT MON↵ back to the top
The brief is different because of what readers clicked
Once an issue has been out, Writesy reads per-link clicks back from Mailchimp or beehiiv and attributes each one to the source that produced it. Sources your readers actually open rise. The loop closes, and the next brief knows something the last one did not.
Professional tier. Mailchimp and beehiiv only.
The ranking
No model decides what is interesting.
The order of your brief is arithmetic, not a judgement call by a language model. You can reason about it, and the same inputs always produce the same order.
score = source weight × recency × topic match × novelty × reader engagement- No embeddings and no model call anywhere in the ranking path.
- Stories that two of your feeds both carried collapse into a single row.
- Anything already sent in a past issue is marked and pushed down.
- The engagement factor stays between 0.6 and 1.6, so clicks tilt the order without ever taking it over.
Where we stand
Against the tools you are probably already paying for.
Writesy is not an email service provider and is not trying to replace one. The useful question is not which product is better — it is which half of the job each one does. Two of these rows are ours; three of them are theirs.
| Writesy | beehiiv | Curated.co | HeyNews | DIY stack | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What we built that they did not | |||||
| Drops stories you already sentDedup against your own back issues | Yes | No | No | Not stated | No |
| Ranks candidates against your past decisionsSkipping a source changes what surfaces next week | Yes | No | No | Not stated | No |
| Reader clicks feed back into the next issue’s rankingNot just a dashboard — the ranking actually moves | Partly | No | No | Not stated | No |
| Watches sources beyond RSSYouTube, subreddits, podcasts, Google Alerts, newsletters in your inbox, a browser clipper | Yes | Partly | Partly | Yes | Yes |
| Runs your own direct sponsorsRate card, public media kit, placement calendar, revenue per issue | Yes | Partly | No | No | No |
| Forces a verbatim quote plus your own takeStructure that keeps the issue yours, not a summary pile | Yes | No | Partly | No | No |
| What they do and we do not | |||||
| Sends or schedules to your subscribersWe schedule on your provider. We never send from our own infrastructure. | Partly | Yes | Yes | Partly | Partly |
| Hosts your list, signup pages and growth toolsWe do not do this either. | No | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Drag-and-drop design editorAlso not us. | No | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Entry price for this workflow | |||||
| Cost to run itAs displayed on each vendor’s pricing page | $19/moSolo. Free tier: one brief. | $0/moLaunch, to 2,500 subs | Freeto 1,500 subs | $39/moHobbyist, 14-day trial | $0–20n8n or Zapier |
MethodWhere every one of these answers came from
Each competitor answer was checked against that company’s own public pricing, features or documentation pages on 8 September 2026, as part of a review of ten products. Where a vendor does not publish an answer we record n/s rather than assuming a No. These products ship quickly and any of this can change without notice — check their current pages before you decide. Writesy’s own answers are taken from this codebase, not from marketing copy.
- Drops stories you already sentbeehiiv’s Agent page describes access to "subscribers, posts, segments, automations, and analytics"; prior-issue memory and dedup are absent from it. Curated.co’s features page lists manual capture with no dedup. HeyNews does not state a dedup mechanism.
- Ranks candidates against your past decisionsNo product among the ten we checked describes a ranker that reads the operator’s own use and skip history. DigestFlow’s "Save history" is an archive of past outputs, which does not feed ranking.
- Reader clicks feed back into the next issue’s rankingbeehiiv and Curated.co both report per-link clicks — Curated: "which links were most popular overall" — but neither states that clicks change future curation. Ours reads clicks from Mailchimp and beehiiv only, and needs at least two tracked links before it moves anything.
- Watches sources beyond RSSPaste a channel, subreddit, podcast or site and Writesy resolves the feed behind it; each series also gets its own inbox address so newsletters you subscribe to become a source, plus a browser clipper for pages with no feed. Curated.co offers a bookmarklet, extension and secret email address but "no RSS ingestion and no AI of any kind" on its own features page. beehiiv lists "RSS to Send" only on its Max plan at $96/mo. HeyNews states RSS, social, Reddit and a clipper.
- Runs your own direct sponsorsThis is about YOUR direct sponsor deals, not an ad marketplace. beehiiv runs an Ad Network on its Scale plan ($43/mo) which places advertisers for you — a different thing from tracking sponsors you sold yourself, and its own FAQ does not state the subscriber minimum, open-rate minimum or take rate. Dedicated sponsor-ops tools exist (Sponsy from $79/mo) but do not build the issue. Writesy keeps the rate card, the sponsor pipeline, the booked placements and the revenue line beside the issue they run in.
- Forces a verbatim quote plus your own takeCurated.co’s link format has a comment field but does not capture a verbatim quote from the source page. No other product in the study enforces both.
- Sends or schedules to your subscribersbeehiiv and Curated.co are full sending platforms that own the send. Writesy has no sending infrastructure and hosts no lists: it schedules the issue through your provider’s own API (Mailchimp, Kit, MailerLite, Ghost), and where a plan cannot schedule — beehiiv without the Send API, Substack which has no publish API at all — it saves a draft and emails you a reminder at the time you picked, rather than pretending it went out.
- Hosts your list, signup pages and growth toolsbeehiiv ships referral and recommendation growth features, and an ad network on its Scale plan at $43/mo. Keep your existing provider — Writesy sits in front of it, not instead of it.
- Drag-and-drop design editorBoth beehiiv and Curated.co ship visual editors. Writesy produces clean, structured HTML sections and stops there.
beehiiv, Curated.co, HeyNews, Mailchimp, Kit, Ghost, Substack, n8n and Zapier are trademarks of their respective owners. They are named here only to identify the products being compared, and none of these companies is affiliated with or endorses Writesy.
Before you sign up
What it deliberately does not do.
Six things worth knowing now rather than on day three.
It never sends your newsletter itself
Writesy has no sending infrastructure and hosts no lists. It can schedule an issue through your provider’s own API, but the send always happens on your provider, to your list, under your sending domain. That is a deliberate boundary, not a roadmap item.
Scheduling is opt-in, and some plans cannot do it
Saving a draft for you to review is the default; scheduling has to be switched on per newsletter. Mailchimp Free cannot schedule, beehiiv’s post-creation API is Max and Enterprise only, and Substack has no publish API at all — where a plan can hold a draft but not schedule, Writesy saves the draft and emails you a reminder at the time you picked instead of pretending it went out; on Substack it hands you the HTML.
The browser clipper is not in the Chrome Web Store
It is a small unpacked extension you load yourself in developer mode. That is a real bit of friction and it is the honest state of it today — the inbox address and the feed resolver cover most sources without it.
On beehiiv, pushing an issue needs their Send API
You connect Mailchimp, beehiiv, Kit, Ghost or MailerLite yourself in Settings, and Writesy checks the key against the provider before storing it. But beehiiv’s post-creation API is Max and Enterprise only, so below that Writesy cannot push the issue in and you paste the HTML. Reading your click data back starts on beehiiv’s free plan, wherever the plan exposes per-link stats.
Click learning covers two providers
Mailchimp and beehiiv. Nothing else reports per-link clicks back into the ranker yet, and beehiiv answers only where the plan exposes per-link stats. With no click data the ranker carries on without it — nothing breaks, nothing improves.
It does not write your take
The take box starts empty and stays empty until you fill it. Writesy will draft a one-line summary of what a link says, but the opinion is the part readers subscribed for and the product will not fake it.
Nobody is paying for this yet
Writesy is early. There are no case studies on this page because there are no customers to write them about, and inventing some would be the fastest way to lose the ones we want.
Free, no account
Five tools for the same job.
Useful whether or not you ever sign up. No email required and nothing is stored.
RSS Feed Finder
Paste any site or subreddit and get its real feed URL, validated.
Sponsorship Rate Calculator
What to charge per placement, worked out from your open numbers.
Email Domain Checker
Check SPF, DKIM and DMARC before a send lands in spam.
Curated Section Builder
Turn a link into a quote-and-take block. The studio block, free.
Newsletter Time Audit
Where the hours in a single issue actually go.
Pricing
Start on the free brief.
The free tier is one brief, not a countdown — run it whenever you are ready and see what it finds before deciding anything.
Solo
$19/moRun it every week.
- 15 sources
- Unlimited briefs
- Build issues from your picks
- Export as HTML
Professional
$39/moClose the loop on clicks.
- 25 sources
- Everything in Solo
- Click learning from Mailchimp and beehiiv
- Per-issue scorecard
Credits cover the rest of the platform too — see the full pricing page.
Questions
The ones worth answering.
Is this an RSS to newsletter automation?
Only halfway, and deliberately. Writesy does the reading — it fetches your feeds, collapses duplicate stories, drops what you already covered and ranks what is left. It stops before the part that matters: you choose every link and you write every take. If you want a tool that turns a feed into a finished email with nobody in the loop, an n8n or Zapier template does that today for free, and your readers will be able to tell.
Does Writesy send my newsletter?
Not from our infrastructure, ever. Writesy is not an email service provider and does not host your list. What it can do is schedule the issue through your provider’s own API — Mailchimp, Kit, MailerLite and Ghost — so the send happens on your account, to your list, under your sending domain. Scheduling is off by default and switched on per newsletter. Where a plan cannot schedule (beehiiv without the Send API, Substack which has no publish API), it saves a draft and emails you a reminder at the time you chose. You can also just export clean HTML and paste it anywhere.
What does "since your last issue" actually mean?
Each brief is anchored to the moment you last shipped an issue, not to a rolling seven-day window. Miss a week and the next brief covers the whole gap rather than silently dropping everything in between. If you have never shipped one, it falls back to a seven-day window and says so on the brief.
Is the curation done by AI?
The ranking is not. It is a deterministic score — source weight, recency, topic match, novelty and reader engagement, multiplied together. No embeddings, no model deciding what is interesting, and the same inputs always produce the same order. AI is used for one optional thing: a one-line summary of what a link says, which costs up to 3 credits and which you can switch off.
What do I get for free?
One brief. Add up to five sources, run a brief, and see exactly what it finds and what it remembers — no card. Building issues from your picks starts on Solo at $19 a month, which also raises the source limit to fifteen.
How is this different from beehiiv or Curated.co?
They host and send your newsletter; Writesy does not. What they do not do is remember. Neither states a mechanism for dropping stories you already covered, or for letting your past skips change what surfaces next week, and that memory is the entire point of this product. The honest read is that Writesy sits in front of your existing provider rather than replacing it.
Can I add newsletters I subscribe to as a source?
Yes. Each newsletter you run gets its own inbox address — forward or subscribe with it and the issues that arrive become candidates like any other source, with the tracking links unwrapped and the footer boilerplate stripped. For pages that publish no feed at all there is a small browser clipper, though that one is an unpacked extension you load yourself rather than a Chrome Web Store install.
Can I run sponsors through it?
Yes, for sponsors you sold yourself. You set a rate card, publish a media kit page you can send to a buyer, track the pipeline from pitched to booked, and see the revenue against the issue a placement actually ran in. It is not an ad marketplace and it will not find advertisers for you — that is what beehiiv’s Ad Network does, and it is a different job.
What happens to my sources and picks if I stop paying?
They stay. Feeds, past briefs, decisions and issues remain in your account, and every issue you have built can be exported as HTML at any time.
Run one brief on your own sources.
Add up to 5 feeds and see what comes back. If the ranking is wrong for your newsletter you will know inside a minute, and it costs you nothing to find out.