Monitor Kit — a feed monitor you deploy yourself

monitor-kit bot · daily digest · 08:00

Telegram digest showing five Hacker News stories surfaced from thirty, each with a one-line reason it matched the criteria

real run · Hacker News front page · 30 items in, 5 surfaced

What it does

It watches a source, reads every new item, and scores each one against criteria you write in plain English. Not keyword matching. You tell it "surface model releases and LLM dev tooling, skip funding news and politics," and Claude decides what fits.

What clears the bar lands in your Telegram as a scheduled digest, each item with a one-line reason it matched. The screenshot above is a real run: thirty stories read, five surfaced. You stop scanning feeds and read a short list of what actually matters to you.

What pre-order gets you

Now

The working demo repo

The exact thing in the screenshot. Clone it, add your API key and a Telegram bot token, point it at a feed, run it. It works today.

At launch

The full kit

The config-driven version, with the source types, criteria patterns, and deploy docs built out. Add your own sources without rewriting anything.

You're buying the kit. The working demo is what you get to hold while it's finished.

What you're buying

A private repo you deploy and own. Config-driven, so you add sources and change criteria by editing a file, never by touching code. It ships with the parts that are tedious to get right on your own:

✓Dedupe, so you never get pinged twice for the same item.
✓State that survives a restart, so a redeploy doesn't replay your whole feed.
✓Retries on the API and delivery calls.
✓Digest delivery that chunks cleanly instead of hitting message-length limits.

Deploy notes for GCP, Railway, and local. A setup doc that gets you from clone to first digest.

Questions a developer would actually ask

I could build this in an afternoon.+

You could. This is the afternoon you get back, with the edge cases already solved. If wiring dedupe and restart-safe state sounds fun, skip it. If you'd rather ship today, it's €29.

How is this different from the Claude docs?+

The docs give you snippets that work in isolation. This is the assembled, deployable version, with the config pattern so you add sources without rewriting, plus the parts tutorials skip: dedupe, surviving restarts, and delivery that doesn't spam you or hit length limits.

What happens when the API or a source changes?+

It's pinned to a working version and simple enough to maintain yourself. You get patches when I ship them. It's a kit you own outright, not a service that can disappear on you.

Honest about what this is

It's a starter kit, not a service. You host it, you own it, it can't vanish or start charging monthly. It's pinned to a working API version and kept simple enough that you maintain it yourself.

The demo you get today is one worked example: feed in, Claude scoring, Telegram digest out. The full kit broadens that into the config-driven version. If you want the finished product before it's finished, this isn't for you yet. If you want the working pattern now and the fuller kit as it lands, that's the deal.

It reads the whole feed.
You read the digest.