A daily competitor news digest in Slack for ~$1.50 a month (n8n + Google News)

A developer built a five-node n8n workflow that posts a daily Slack digest of brand and competitor news pulled from Google News, costing about $1.50 a month. The workflow calls the developer's own Apify Google News Scraper via a synchronous HTTP request, deduplicates articles by publisher URL across runs, and groups results by query into a single Slack message, skipping quiet days entirely. The developer notes that duplicates are removed after the run and are still billed, so the per-source article cap should be set near realistic daily volume.

Google Alerts still exists, but it has been unreliable for years: late, incomplete, and stuck in your inbox. What I actually wanted was simpler: every morning, one Slack message with what was published about our brand and our competitors in the last 24 hours, with links to the original articles, and nothing I have already seen. This is the n8n workflow that does it. It has five nodes, takes about five minutes to set up and costs around $1.50 a month. Disclosure: the news data comes from the Google News Scraper on Apify, which I built. Prices and limits are below. News digest 2026-10-20: 19 new article s OpenAI 10 - OpenAI races to raise $30 billion at $1.4 trillion valuation ahead of Anthropic IPO CTech - EXCLUSIVE: OpenAI seeks to accelerate fundraising ahead of Anthropic IPO, sources say Reuters - Lawsuit alleges OpenAI 'stole' children's user data Mashable ... Anthropic 9 - Former Google CEO Schmidt owns 1% stake in Anthropic, Bloomberg reports Reuters - Anthropic is AI trade's last big hope for a major IPO this year CNBC ... That is real output from a test run, with "OpenAI" and "Anthropic" as example queries. In Slack every headline is a link to the publisher's page, not to a Google redirect. Schedule daily 7:30 → HTTP Request: Google News Scraper → Remove Duplicates previous executions, by URL → Code: build digest → Slack + optional e-mail An HTTP Request node calls the Actor through Apify's synchronous endpoint run-sync-get-dataset-items , which runs it and returns the results in one request: { "queries": "\"OpenAI\"", "\"Anthropic\"" , "edition": "US:en", "timeRange": "1d", "maxArticlesPerSource": 10, "includeFullText": false } A few details that matter for monitoring: Acme Corp also matches every article that mentions "acme" and "corp" separately. "Acme" -jobs , intitle:acme , site:techcrunch.com . edition sets country and language; 18 editions are supported US, UK, Germany, France, Japan... . title , source , publishedAt and the news.google.com/rss/articles/... redirect links; the Actor decodes them. That matters for the next step. Authentication is an n8n Header Auth credential: Authorization: Bearer <Apify token . The 1d window overlaps from day to day, and big stories stay in the results for a while. The Remove Duplicates node in "Remove items processed in previous executions" mode, keyed on {{ $json.url }} , remembers every URL it has passed through and drops repeats. Because the URLs are the real publisher URLs, the key is stable. Two caveats: I don't want 20 Slack notifications. A Code node groups the articles by query, sorts each group newest first, caps it at 10 and builds Slack mrkdwn plus an HTML version for e-mail: js const groups = {}; for const a of articles { const key = String a.query || a.topic || 'Other' .replace /"/g, '' ; groups key = groups key || .push a ; } // ... - <${a.url}|${title} ${source} per article If there are no new articles the node returns an empty array, so no message is sent. Quiet days stay quiet. A standard Slack node posts {{ $json.text }} to news-alerts . There is also a disabled Send Email node wired to the same output; enable it and add SMTP credentials to get the digest by mail as well. The Actor charges $0.0025 per article plus $0.0025 per article if you turn on full-text extraction and text was found . With two queries and a cap of 10 articles each, the worst case is 20 articles a day, about $1.50 a month . Quiet brands cost less. Note that duplicates are dropped in n8n after the run, so they are still paid for; set maxArticlesPerSource near the number of articles you realistically expect per day. Apify's free plan includes $5 per month, enough for this and a few more workflows. includeFullText: true and add an LLM step: "Summarise in two sentences and rate the sentiment towards our brand." @channel only when "topics": "TECHNOLOGY" to get the top headlines of whole sections. "edition": "DE:de" and merge. Questions or ideas for the next recipe? Leave a comment.