PolitePol (now PolitePaul) and FiveFilters alternatives
PolitePol is now PolitePaul, and it still turns a web page into an RSS feed. FiveFilters' free Full-Text RSS endpoint answered one of our requests with "discontinued for general use" and pointed us to Feed Control, its paid product, which now lists Google News as a source.
I read every vendor page below on 2026-10-22, re-read them on 2026-10-26 (no price changed), and ran two requests against FiveFilters' old endpoint on 2026-10-22. I did not sign up for anything, so "page read" below means exactly that: we read the page and did not test the feature.
What PolitePol is now
The old domain politepol.com answers with a 301 to https://politepaul.com/. The site's moving page, dated March 18, 2026, says: "We have changed our name to PolitePaul... Due to issues with our domain registrar, we're moving to a new address." It adds that the old address "is working too but it redirects". That is why a search for "politepol" now finds mostly other tools.
It is a page-to-feed generator. On its About and FAQ pages the free features are:
- a visual builder, where you click a field name and then the matching text on the page
- an XPath 1.0 and 2.0 selector editor for when the builder picks the wrong thing
- tags, sorting and search across your feeds
- XML and JSON output
- an email notice when a feed breaks
Paid features are JavaScript page loading, a proxy for sites that block its servers, a cookie editor, images and date parsing.
| Plan | Price on 2026-10-26 | Feeds | Update interval |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 3 | 1.5 hours, "Delivered by" text added to feeds |
| Monthly | $5.54 a month | 20 selected on the page | 10 minutes |
| Yearly | $4.99 a month, $59.83 billed annually | 20 selected on the page | 10 minutes |
The paid plans show a feed-count dropdown set to 20. We did not change it. The page's own price script lists higher prices for larger counts, for example $13.85 monthly for 50 feeds.
Where it stops: The builder fills Title and Description from the markup of the page you select. We did not find full-article extraction, Markdown output or a webhook on the pages we read. That is a statement about those pages, not about the product.
Pick it when you want a feed from a site that has none, for a few dollars a month. Feedmarkdown does not do that. Direct site sources and plain RSS are on our roadmap, not shipped.
What FiveFilters offers now
FiveFilters is now several products. This is what each page said on 2026-10-26.
| Product | What the page says | Price on 2026-10-26 |
|---|---|---|
| Full-Text RSS, hosted | ftr.fivefilters.org: "Ways to keep getting full-text feeds" lists Feed Control, a premium access-key form, and the API |
n/a |
| Full-Text RSS, self-hosted | Version 3.9.13, dated 5 March 2023, "We're working on an update". The hosted page says "Coming soon" and "We're not selling the latest version just yet" | n/a |
| Full-Text RSS API (RapidAPI) | "Plain text, markdown, or HTML" | Basic $0 with a hard limit of 250 requests a month; Pro $30; Ultra $100; Mega $200 |
| Feed Creator (page to feed) | The Feed Control pricing page says it generates feeds from web pages, which Feed Control then monitors | see Feed Control |
| Feed Control | Hosted feed monitor with full-text expansion, webhooks, JSON output | Basic $7.20, Plus $20, Business $64 a month |
One mismatch: The fivefilters.org/full-text-rss/ page still describes a hosted plan at "$9 monthly" with "Up to 10 items returned per feed". The Feed Control pricing page shows different plans. I quote the pricing page.
We ran none of the self-hosted code. A community Docker image of Full-Text RSS exists, but we did not pull it, and we would not put third-party code from an unknown source on a public server without reading it first. Version 3.9.13, from March 2023, is the last release the vendor page lists.
What happened when we asked the old free service for an article
At 19:46 UTC we sent requests for two URLs to the old endpoint, one attempt each, no key and no account. The endpoint redirects once, from ftr.fivefilters.org to ftr.fivefilters.net.
curl -sS -L -o a.xml -w "%{http_code} %{size_download} bytes, %{num_redirects} redirect(s)\n" \
"http://ftr.fivefilters.org/makefulltextfeed.php?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.medialens.org%2F2019%2Fthe-arrogance-of-bbc-news%2F"
curl -sS -L -o b.xml -w "%{http_code} %{size_download} bytes, %{num_redirects} redirect(s)\n" \
"http://ftr.fivefilters.org/makefulltextfeed.php?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fnews%2Farticles%2Fcky83vwnyglno"
The first URL is FiveFilters' own example article. It returned 200 with a 31,167 byte full-text feed. The second is a BBC News article from the same day. It returned 410 with a 743 byte body whose first comment reads "The free Full-Text RSS service has been discontinued for general use." Those are the vendor's words, and they are what the endpoint sent us.
Two URLs prove very little. We do not know why the example worked and the BBC article did not. The response headers on the 200 showed a Cloudflare cache hit (cf-cache-status: HIT), so it may have been a cached copy. That is what the headers show. It is not a confirmed reason, and we are not claiming the service is shut down. The response body also says that people with existing free URLs can contact the vendor about pricing.
For comparison, we fetched the same BBC URL with webcr -m, a Markdown scraper. It returned 883 words and 5,836 bytes. Getting full text from one URL is a solved problem with many tools. The useful questions are what format comes out and how it reaches your code.
What full text RSS returns from each tool
Feeds that carry only a summary are why people search for "full text RSS". Here is what each option returns, from the pages we read.
| Tool | Output | Delivery |
|---|---|---|
| PolitePaul | The fields you select (Title, Description); we did not find full article text | XML or JSON feed |
| FiveFilters API | "plain text, markdown, or HTML" per the RapidAPI listing; not run | API call, XML or JSON |
| Feed Control | content, content_clean_html, content_plain_text in webhooks; we did not find a Markdown field |
Webhook, Slack, Discord, generated RSS or JSON |
Feed Control, the part that overlaps with news
Feed Control is the closest overlap with what we build, so it gets the detail. The pricing page lists a 7-day trial of Plus with no card required, and three paid plans.
| Plan | Per month | Refresh | RSS feeds | Max items in output |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $7.20 | 1 hour | 20 | 10 |
| Plus | $20 | 30 minutes | 40 | 20 |
| Business | $64 | 15 minutes | 100 | 50 |
Each plan carries a line such as "Save $22/year vs monthly billing" under Basic, so these look like the annual-billing prices. We did not read the monthly figures. Plus and Business list "Google News support". Every plan lists webpage to RSS, feed expansion, email alerts, filters and JSON output.
The webhook docs describe a JSON POST per item. Your server should answer 200 within 15 seconds. Failed requests are retried every 30 minutes and dropped after 10 failures. We did not find a signature header in that article.
What we cannot tell you, because we did not sign up: how its Google News source resolves Google's redirect links (see why those links need resolving), whether it removes duplicates across feeds, and what "Google News support" covers beyond that one line. We searched the vendor's help center for "google news" and found no article on it.
It is the better pick when you want one hosted tool for mixed sources (feeds, web pages, Google News), alerts to email, Slack or Discord, widgets, and a price between $7.20 and $64 a month.
What to use for news
- A site with no feed: PolitePaul, or Feed Control with its Feed Creator.
- A summary-only feed that needs full text: Feed Control, or the FiveFilters API.
- One article as text: the FiveFilters API or any Markdown scraper. Feeding news to an LLM shows what the Markdown step looks like.
- Google News stories as full text, in a signed webhook: Feedmarkdown, or Feed Control's Google News option.
- Your own server: the self-hosted Full-Text RSS, once the vendor ships its update. We did not run it.
For the free Google News feed itself, see the Google News RSS feed guide. For other ways to get Google News data, see Is there a Google News API?. For what a feed layer plus a scraper costs per month, see the newsletter stack cost post.
What we did not test
- Signing up for PolitePaul, Feed Control or the RapidAPI API, and any paid plan.
- JavaScript-rendered pages.
- Self-hosted Full-Text RSS.
- How Feed Control resolves Google News links, or whether it deduplicates.
- Webhook reliability on any service.
- Feed freshness over time.
Skip the plumbing for Google News
Feedmarkdown takes a Google News search or a Google Alerts RSS link as the source. It resolves the redirect links to the real publisher URL, removes duplicate stories before it scrapes, and delivers each new article as Markdown by an HMAC-SHA256 signed webhook, or as JSON Feed 1.1 or Atom you pull. The webhook payload carries title, url, source, author, published_at and markdown. It is not a page-to-feed tool, and it has no email or Slack alerts and no widgets. Sources are Google News and Google Alerts only.
We made one run on 2026-10-22, through a test organization, with the query Meta Zuckerberg California billionaire tax when:1d, built from the story that BBC article covers. Feedmarkdown takes a search, not a URL, so the BBC article itself did not come back. Three stories from other outlets did: 3 found, 3 new, 0 duplicates, 3 scraped, 0 errors, about 19 seconds from start to finish. We deleted the feed and source afterwards. One run says little about reliability. Plans are on the pricing section of the home page.