X-Relay vs RSS.app

Quick answer: One number decides this comparison: refresh interval. RSS.app rebuilds a feed on a schedule — 24 hours on the free plan, 60 minutes on its cheapest paid plan, and 15 minutes at best on the tiers above (checked August 2026). That is the floor on how late a post can reach you, and no amount of fast delivery afterwards recovers it. X-Relay watches continuously instead: we re-check a tracked account as often as every 300 ms. There is also a catch worth knowing before you plan around the free tier: X feeds are not included on RSS.app's free plan at all.

What an interval actually costs you

"Polling" sounds like a technical footnote. It is not — it is the entire product difference, and it is easiest to see with a clock.

Suppose a KOL posts a contract address at 14:07. On a 60-minute schedule, your feed last rebuilt at 14:00 and rebuilds again at 15:00. You learn about it 53 minutes late. On a 15-minute schedule you learn at 14:15, 8 minutes late. The average delay is half the interval; the worst case is the whole interval, and the worst case happens as often as any other case.

RSS.app figures read from rss.app's pricing and feature pages, checked August 2026; the prices shown there are annual-billing rates. The X-Relay rows carry no delay column because a continuous re-check has no refresh cycle to be caught out by, and we do not publish a delivery figure — see how fast is X-Relay. Note that RSS.app's Discord bot page separately claims a 15-minute check on all feeds, which cannot be true on a 60-minute Basic feed — treat their published intervals as the reliable number.

For a blog digest or a news roundup, fifteen minutes is completely fine and RSS is the right technology. For a contract drop, fifteen minutes is not a delay, it is a different event. The chart you are looking at when the alert lands bears no relationship to the chart when the post went up.

The free-tier catch

RSS.app's free plan allows two feeds — but social-media sources, keyword filters and the Discord and Telegram bot integrations are all excluded from it. In practice, you cannot get an X feed into Discord or Telegram on the free plan. The cheapest route to that is the Basic plan at $8.32/month on annual billing, which is the 60-minute tier.

This matters because "RSS.app is free" is the reason most people try it, and the free version does not do the thing they came for. Worth knowing before you build a workflow around it.

Feature comparison

What RSS.app is genuinely good at

This is not a bad product, it is a product for a different job — and for that job it beats us outright:

• Many kinds of source in one place. Blogs, news sites, YouTube channels, newsletters and X, all normalised into feeds landing in one channel. X-Relay does X and nothing else.
• No-code feed building, including turning pages that do not publish a feed into one.
• Native Discord and Telegram bots. No Zapier in the middle — which matters more than it used to, because Zapier's X integration has been dead since August 2023 and has not returned, despite headlines to the contrary that still circulate.
• Card and PayPal billing, with an invoice. X-Relay takes crypto only.
• Cheaper, if an hourly check is acceptable.

If you are building a community's news channel — project blogs, protocol announcements, a YouTube channel, a couple of X accounts — RSS.app is the better tool and the cheaper one. Nothing about trading applies to that use case.

What RSS structurally cannot do

Some of these are not RSS.app's fault; they are properties of the feed format itself, which is worth understanding because they apply to every RSS bridge you might try instead:

• Replies and quotes. A feed carries an account's published items. The reply under someone else's post — where contracts land — is not a feed item.
• Non-post events. A follow, an unfollow, a bio edit, a Space going live: none of these produce a feed item, because they are not documents.
• Enrichment. A feed item is text and a link. Reading a contract address out of it, identifying the chain and attaching live price and liquidity is work that has to happen somewhere, and a feed reader does not do it. See how CA detection works.
• Sub-interval latency. Not a limitation of the vendor — a scheduled rebuild cannot beat its own schedule.

Which to pick

• Aggregating many non-X sources into a channel → RSS.app, and it is not close.
• Hourly or daily is fine → RSS.app, cheaper.
• You need a card and an invoice → RSS.app; we cannot help you.
• You act on what you read, on a timescale of minutes or less → X-Relay.
• You need replies, quotes, contract detection or translation → X-Relay; RSS cannot express those.
• You want to test for free → X-Relay's Discord tier covers 2 accounts permanently; RSS.app's free plan excludes X entirely.

Moving an X feed over

1. Open @x_relay_bot on Telegram, or add X-Relay to Discord.
2. Add the same handles your feeds point at — or paste an X List link to import a set at once.
3. Turn on the activities RSS could not express: replies, quotes, follows, profile edits, contract detection.
4. Keep the RSS feed running in a second channel for a day and compare arrival times. The gap is usually more obvious than people expect.

FAQ

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