I Built an AI News Digest from 21 Sources. It Costs Me $0/Month.

The Problem

Dozens of AI news items drop every day. OpenAI ships something, Anthropic drops a new model, Google announces a Gemini update. I need to know about it because my work depends on it.

But manually scrolling HackerNews, Twitter, Product Hunt and 18 other sources? That's at least an hour a day. And most of it is noise.

What I Built

A Node.js script running on my Mac as a LaunchAgent. No server, no Docker, no subscription.

The pipeline:

• Fetches RSS feeds from 21 sources (8-second timeout per feed to avoid hanging)
• Filters out articles older than 4 hours
• Deduplicates against state from the last 14 days (JSON file in ~/.work-os/)
• Sends new articles to OpenAI GPT-4.1-mini for classification and summarization
• Generates an HTML dashboard with the overview
• Archives locally

21 Sources I Track

Split into categories:

• AI labs: OpenAI blog, Anthropic blog, Google AI blog, Meta AI
• Community: HackerNews (AI section), Product Hunt, GitHub Trending
• News: The Verge AI, Ars Technica AI, TechCrunch AI
• Research: arXiv AI highlights, Papers with Code
• And 9 more specific feeds

Each feed has an 8-second timeout. If a source doesn't respond, the script moves on. No waiting for slow servers.

Deduplication — That's the Key

Without dedup, I'd get every article 5x daily. Solution: a JSON state file with SHA hash of each article and a timestamp.

Articles older than 14 days are automatically pruned from state. This keeps the file from growing forever while preventing duplicates even after restarts.

Automatic Schedule

macOS LaunchAgent runs it 5x daily: 6:00, 10:00, 14:00, 18:00, and 22:00. Plus it fires on system login.

No cron, no server. Just a plist file in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/.

What It Costs

Item	Cost

RSS feeds	free
OpenAI GPT-4.1-mini (classification)	~$0.50/month
macOS LaunchAgent	free
Hosting	none (local)
Total	~$0.50/month

Compare that to AI newsletter subscriptions at $10-30/month that send you the same stuff as Twitter.

What I'd Do Differently

In hindsight, I'd add Slack/Discord notifications for breaking news (when OpenAI or Anthropic drops a new model). Right now I use the HTML dashboard, which means opening a file.

I'd also add sentiment analysis — whether the news is positive/negative for my business.

But honestly? Even as-is, it saves me an hour a day. And that's enough.