I Built an AI-Powered News Digest That Runs Itself for $5/Month — Here's How

I wanted one place to see the day's most important stories, organized by category, without the noise of a 24/7 news cycle. Nothing I found did exactly that — so I built it in a day. It's called Le Bref (French for "The Brief"). It scrapes 25+ RSS feeds twice a day, uses Claude AI to pick the top stories, summarizes them into 3 tiers of depth, and stores everything in a permanent searchable archive. Total monthly cost to run: about $5-10. Here's the full breakdown. The Problem Every news app I tried had the same issues: Paywalled (The Economist's Espresso, premium newsletters) Ephemeral (today's digest replaces yesterday's — no archive) Uncategorized (everything dumped into one feed) Too long (I want the gist, not a 2,000-word article) I wanted a site where I could glance at today's highlights in 30 seconds, read more if something caught my eye, and go back to any past date to see what happened. The Architecture [25 RSS Feeds] → [Python Cron Job] → [Claude API] → [Supabase] → [Next.js F