Rhyter Times started as a news aggregation site: 400+ real sources, regional coverage, cross-outlet story comparisons. At some point the obvious next question showed up — if the pipeline behind the site is already doing all this work, why should the only way to use it be a browser?
The case for opening it up
A few things pushed us toward shipping an actual API and MCP server rather than keeping the pipeline as an internal implementation detail of one website:
- AI agents are a real audience now, and they don't browse websites the way people do. An MCP server means an agent can query current, structured news directly, the same way it would call any other tool.
- Developers building on top of news data are stuck choosing between scraping and expensive legacy APIs. We'd already solved the sourcing problem for our own site; not offering it to anyone else felt like leaving a real gap unfilled for no reason.
- Transparency is a genuine differentiator here. A lot of aggregation products treat their source list as the product's secret sauce. We think the opposite is more trustworthy: you should be able to see exactly which outlets are feeding a given response, not just take our word for it.
What shipped
A REST API and an MCP server, both backed by the exact same pipeline the public site runs on — headlines, regional coverage, story syntheses, and the source directory itself. Free tier is 100 requests/day with no credit card required, with paid tiers for anyone running this at real volume.
Full details and sign-up: aristocles.com.au/products/news
If you're building something that needs current news data and have been putting off the "figure out sourcing" problem, happy to answer questions about what's actually available through it in the comments.
Top comments (0)