We made a reasonable amount progress in building our own minimalist website aggregator [0] until we gave up.
The plan was too source news from Reddit, HN, Several Newsletters and of course the Wikipedia News Portal. I was proud of the stack (Backend is google sheets) but I underestimated the dedication. To build a news aggregator you have to pick the news links on a daily basis and not skip a day. It takes an hour to just to sift through all the days mess as these days significant world news, in my opinion, often doesn't turn up on the front page anywhere. Also some significant world news have so much frequency you have to actually think what to post and if you should remove redundant past articles.
Just picking the article took me an 1 hour a day and I wanted to summarise the content which would have easily taken my 1-2 hours more.
I respect that OP is charging atleast something for their service, because if they didn't I personally don't see how they can continue running the site.
The plan was too source news from Reddit, HN, Several Newsletters and of course the Wikipedia News Portal. I was proud of the stack (Backend is google sheets) but I underestimated the dedication. To build a news aggregator you have to pick the news links on a daily basis and not skip a day. It takes an hour to just to sift through all the days mess as these days significant world news, in my opinion, often doesn't turn up on the front page anywhere. Also some significant world news have so much frequency you have to actually think what to post and if you should remove redundant past articles.
Just picking the article took me an 1 hour a day and I wanted to summarise the content which would have easily taken my 1-2 hours more.
I respect that OP is charging atleast something for their service, because if they didn't I personally don't see how they can continue running the site.
[0] https://worthreading.netlify.app/