A market-monitoring stack for solo consultants: sources, filtering, digest

If you consult in a specific domain, part of your value is simply knowing what happened this week — which vendor changed pricing, which regulation moved, who got acquired. Clients assume you're on top of it. Staying on top of it, as one person, is a real time cost.

Here's a stack that covers it in about 15 minutes a week, and where the shortcut is if you'd rather not maintain it.

Step 1: Decide what you're actually monitoring

Be concrete. "The industry" is not a monitoring target. Write down:

• 3–6 companies — the vendors and competitors that come up in client conversations.
• 2–4 topics — "AI Overviews", "MiCA compliance", "outcome-based pricing" — phrased the way a headline would phrase them.
• 1–2 events you never want to miss — a specific competitor cutting prices, a regulatory deadline.

That list is the whole spec. Everything below is plumbing.

Step 2: Sources

Match the source type to what you're tracking.

Practical notes:

• Google News RSS is underrated: https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=YOUR+QUERY&hl=en gives you a dated, structured feed for any query, free, no key.
• Pricing and changelog pages rarely have feeds. This is the one place you need a change-detection tool (Visualping, Distill.io, or similar).
• Keep it to 15–30 sources. More than that and you're back to noise.

Step 3: Filtering

Raw feeds are ~70% noise: syndicated press releases, "top 10 alternatives" listicles, the same story from multiple outlets.

Minimum viable filter:

• Mute obvious noise keywords in your reader (Feedly, Inoreader): "alternatives", "vs", "review", "coupon".
• De-duplicate by hand as you skim — if you've seen the acquisition once, skip the other four.
• Ignore anything undated or older than a week.

This is the step that doesn't scale well. It's fine at 15 sources and a weekly cadence; it gets tedious daily.

Step 4: The digest

Once a week, block 15 minutes:

1. Skim the filtered feeds.
2. Pull the 5–10 items that matter into a note.
3. For each, write one line: what happened + what it means for a client.

That second line is the entire point. "Semrush raised prices" is data. "Semrush raised prices, so your client's Q1 tooling budget needs revisiting and it's a reason to revisit the Ahrefs comparison" is consulting.

Optionally, run the raw items through ChatGPT or Claude with a standing prompt to draft the summaries — but you still have to supply the "what it means" context and check the output.

What this costs you

• Setup: 1–2 hours.
• Running it: ~15 min/week if you're disciplined, plus the occasional session fixing a broken feed.
• Tools: $0–14/month (change detection is the only thing that might cost).

That's genuinely workable. The failure mode isn't cost — it's that the weekly 15 minutes is the first thing to get skipped when you're busy, and three skipped weeks later you've missed something a client asks about.

The shortcut

We built EveBrief for exactly this: you give it the list from Step 1 in plain English, it runs Steps 2–4, and you get one briefing — grouped, deduplicated, each item with a "why it matters to you" line written against your stated interests. Plus an instant alert for the one or two events you flagged as never-miss.

It's the same stack, with the two annoying parts (the weekly filtering slog, and maintaining feeds) handled. Free tier for a weekly digest of 3 sources; $19/mo for the full thing.

Pre-launch — waitlist here, launch pricing locked in for early members.