Building automations with the SereneReader API

Why automate your reading?

RSS already brings content from many sources into one place. The SereneReader API lets you pull that content into scripts, cron jobs and other tools.

Authentication is a single API key: create one, send it with each HTTP request, and get JSON back. The API is read-only and has no webhooks, so scripts poll it on a schedule.

Getting started

API access is included with Pro ($5/month on the web) and Team.

Create an API key

In SereneReader, open Settings and choose the API tab. Create a key, give it a name you'll recognize later, and copy it somewhere safe; it's only shown once. Pro accounts can have up to 5 keys and Team accounts up to 10.

Authentication

Every request needs your key as a Bearer token in the Authorization header. There are no client IDs, refresh tokens or scopes. The API tab in Settings lists the base URL, the endpoints and example requests.

Rate limits

The API allows 30 requests per minute per account, shared across all your keys, which is plenty for scripts that run on a schedule. Each response includes an X-RateLimit-Remaining header. If you go over the limit, the API returns 429 with a Retry-After header; wait that many seconds before trying again.

What you can do

The API gives you read access to your articles and subscriptions:

• GET /api/v1/articles returns articles from your feeds, newest first. You can filter by feed, folder or publish date, and page through results (50 per request by default, up to 200). Each article includes its title, URL, feed name, author, publish date, a snippet, and whether you've read or starred it.
• GET /api/v1/feeds lists your subscriptions with their unread counts and folders.
• GET /api/v1/usage shows how many requests the key you're using has made in the past hour, 8 hours and 24 hours.

The API tab in Settings has the full list of parameters and response fields.

Use cases

Daily digest email

Write a script that runs every morning at 7am, fetches the previous day's articles, and sends you a summary email. Filter by date, pipe the JSON through jq to pull out titles and URLs, and send the result with whatever email or notification tool you use.

Quiet-feed check

Feeds break: domains expire, paths change, servers go down. The API doesn't report fetch errors or when a feed last published, but a weekly script can still spot feeds that have gone quiet. List your feeds, request recent articles for each one with the feedId and since parameters, and flag any feed with nothing published in the past few weeks. If you have a lot of feeds, pace the requests to stay under the rate limit.

A quiet feed isn't always a broken one, but the list tells you which blogs to check.

Export to other tools

Pull articles into a local database, a Notion page, an Obsidian vault or a spreadsheet. The API returns structured JSON, so the transformation is usually a few lines of jq or a short Python script.

Combine with AI agents

The API works with AI tools that can make HTTP requests. If you use an assistant such as OpenClaw, you can point it at SereneReader and have it process your feeds. We wrote a separate post on that: How to connect your RSS feeds to AI agents.

More ideas

A few other things you can build in a few lines: a cron job that emails you the day's articles from one folder, a shell alias that adds up the unread counts from /api/v1/feeds, or a polling script that posts new articles from one feed to a Slack channel.

You don't need a framework for any of these. curl and jq cover most cases, and any language with an HTTP client works for the rest.

Create your key in Settings, on the API tab.