How do I send an RSS feed to a webhook?

Create a sink with kind=webhook: POST /v1/sinks with {"kind": "webhook", "url": "https://yourapp.dev/feed-events", "feed_url": "https://anyblog.com/rss.xml"}. emit polls the feed every five minutes with conditional GET and POSTs each new item to your endpoint as application/json, with an X-Emit-Event header of sink.item.

What does the webhook payload look like?

A per-item POST has the shape {"event": "item", "sink_id": "…", "name": "…", "item": {"guid", "title", "url", "summary", "published_at"}}. On a daily or weekly schedule you instead get one POST with "event": "digest" and an "items" array of the same objects. Content-Type is application/json and the X-Emit-Event header is sink.item or sink.digest.

What happens if my endpoint is down?

Any 2xx counts as delivered. Anything else — an error status, a timeout, an unreachable host — leaves the item unconsumed, so it is retried on the next polling cycle rather than dropped. Items are deduplicated by guid, so a republished item won't be delivered twice.

What does RSS-to-webhook cost?

Nothing. Polling feeds and pushing them out — to webhooks, Slack, or Discord — is free on emit. Credits only meter email delivery (1 per email) and optional LLM work (1 credit per 5 items judged, 1 per summary).

RSS → WEBHOOK

Any RSS feed, POSTed to your code as JSON.

Q: Can I use a feed I don't own?

Yes. The feed is just a URL — someone else's blog, a GitHub releases feed, a status page, a subreddit, or a feed emit built for you from a page that had none. You don't need any relationship with the publisher.

You wanted one thing: to know when that feed has something new. What you were about to write was a poller, an XML parser, a seen-items table, a cron entry, and the bug where it re-notifies everything after a deploy. Point emit at the feed instead and every new item arrives at your endpoint as clean JSON.

One call

curl -X POST https://api.rssemit.com/v1/sinks \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $EMIT_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "kind": "webhook",
    "url": "https://yourapp.dev/feed-events",
    "feed_url": "https://anyblog.com/rss.xml"
  }'

That's the whole setup. The feed can be one you don't own — someone else's blog, a GitHub releases feed, a status page, a subreddit — or a feed emit built for you from a page that never had one.

What lands on your endpoint

POST /feed-events
Content-Type: application/json
X-Emit-Event: sink.item

{
  "event": "item",
  "sink_id": "9c1f…",
  "name": "webhook: anyblog.com",
  "item": {
    "guid": "https://anyblog.com/posts/shipping-v2",
    "title": "Shipping v2",
    "url": "https://anyblog.com/posts/shipping-v2",
    "summary": "The rewrite is done and here is what changed…",
    "published_at": "2026-07-30T09:12:00+00:00"
  }
}

Fixed shape, every time — normalized out of whatever RSS 2.0, Atom, or JSON Feed dialect the publisher happened to emit, with the summary already stripped to text. No feed-parsing library in your stack, and no surprise the day a publisher changes CMS.

Or batch it

A busy feed doesn't need to wake your service forty times a day. Set "schedule": "daily" (or "weekly", with your own digest_hour and digest_tz) and emit holds items and sends one POST at the boundary instead:

X-Emit-Event: sink.digest

{
  "event": "digest",
  "sink_id": "9c1f…",
  "name": "webhook: anyblog.com",
  "items": [ { "guid": "…", "title": "…", "url": "…", "summary": "…", "published_at": "…" }, … ]
}

The parts you were going to get wrong

No back-catalog blast. The first poll records a silent baseline, so connecting a feed with ten years of history delivers nothing. You get what's new from that moment on.
Deduplicated by guid. Publishers edit and republish items constantly, and plenty of feeds reorder themselves. You get each item once.
Failures retry, they don't vanish. Any 2xx counts as delivered. An error status, a timeout, an unreachable host — the item stays unconsumed and is retried on the next cycle. The dashboard shows the last error verbatim.
Conditional GET. Feeds are polled every five minutes with If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since, so a quiet feed costs the publisher a 304 rather than a full download.
Your URL is validated. Endpoints are checked against loopback, private, and link-local ranges before anything is sent.

Worth knowing: per-item mode sends up to 10 items per polling cycle, so a feed that dumps fifty posts at once drains over the following cycles rather than stampeding your endpoint. A digest holds up to 200 items between boundaries.

See it before you trust it

POST /v1/sinks/{id}/test sends one real delivery — the newest item already in the feed, or content you pass in — and returns the exact body it posted. In the dashboard, the test button renders that body inline, so you can diff it against your handler before you write a line of it.

This isn't the signed-webhook thing

emit has two kinds of outbound HTTP, and they answer different questions. JSON broadcasts — this page — carry a feed's items, from any feed URL, with optional digest batching. Account-event webhooks carry things that happened in your emit account (a subscriber joined, a broadcast went out); those are HMAC-signed, retried with backoff, and have a per-endpoint delivery log. Most people who arrive here want the first one.

Pricing

Free. Polling feeds and pushing them out — webhooks, Slack, Discord, or the feed itself — costs nothing. Credits meter only email delivery (1 credit per email, $1.60 per 1,000) and optional LLM work (1 credit per 5 items judged, 1 per summary), from one prepaid balance. A webhook sink that never sends an email never spends a credit.

Where it gets interesting

The feed you point at doesn't have to be someone's raw output. Put a filtered feed in front of it — a plain-language prompt over forty sources, LLM-judged, deduplicated — and your endpoint stops receiving everything and starts receiving only what matched. Same payload, far less of it.

Connect a webhook → Read the API docs