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John Yesh
John Yesh

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We built a 400+ source news API instead of paying $200/mo for one

#rhytertimes #news #api #opensource

News aggregation APIs charge real money for something publishers already give away for free to anyone who asks nicely: their own RSS feeds. We built our own aggregation pipeline instead of renting one, and it's live at rhytertimes.com.

What Rhyter Times is

rhytertimes.com is a news aggregation site pulling from 400+ individually vetted, publisher-owned RSS feeds across 10 world regions and 5 core topics (World, Business, Technology, Science, Sports). Every source is a real outlet's own published feed — no scraping, no third-party aggregator in the middle.

A couple of things make it more than a plain RSS reader:

  • Every source is checked for real permission before it's added. We only use feeds where the publisher has actually made them available for this kind of use, not sources we've talked ourselves into.
  • When multiple independent outlets agree on a fact, we say so directly instead of hedging every sentence. Every write-up is original and always credits its sources below — never presented as more than cross-referenced synthesis.

The API + MCP server

The same data is now available outside the site:

  • REST API — headlines, regional news, story syntheses, and the full source directory
  • MCP server — query it directly from an AI agent
  • Free tier: 100 requests/day, no credit card required 
curl -X POST https://rhyter-times-api.onrender.com/v1/auth/register \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"email": "you@example.com", "name": "Your Name"}'

curl https://rhyter-times-api.onrender.com/v1/data/wire \
  -H "X-API-Key: your_api_key_here"
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Full details and sign-up: aristocles.com.au/products/news

Why this matters for anyone building with LLMs

If you're building something that needs current news, you're usually choosing between scraping (fragile, often against ToS) or a legacy API charging a few hundred dollars a month. There's a real middle path, and we'd rather more people knew it exists than assume aggregation has to be expensive.

Read the news: rhytertimes.com
Get an API key: aristocles.com.au/products/news

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