Technical brief: a scheduled relay from publisher feeds to WhatsApp groups

Abstract

WhatsApp offers no feed subscription. Organisations that want their articles to appear in WhatsApp groups therefore operate a relay: a component that reads an RSS feed periodically, isolates items not yet delivered and posts each title with its link. This brief describes the relay as an architecture, compares three ways of operating it, and ends with an operational checklist. The implementation reference is 9bot's RSS setup tutorial. Disclosure: the brief is published by the 9bot team; 9bot is a paid service with a seven day trial and is not endorsed by Meta.

1. Problem statement

Publishers, trade associations and B2B content teams already maintain RSS feeds. Their readers increasingly sit in WhatsApp groups. Without a relay, someone copies links by hand, which fails outside office hours and does not scale across sections. With a naive relay, the opposite happens: every new item is pushed immediately, including at night and in bursts.

2. Reference architecture

  CMS (WordPress)            Relay                              WhatsApp
 +----------------+   +------------------------------+   +--------------------+
 | site/feed/     |-->| read every N minutes         |   | group linked to    |
 | category feeds |   | keep unseen items            |-->| the dashboard,     |
 +----------------+   | hold until posting window    |   | relay is admin,    |
                      | cut to max items per post    |   | admins-only chat   |
                      +------------------------------+   +--------------------+

The relay's configuration surface in 9bot has five fields: feed URL (checked with Verify Feed), posting schedule, interval in minutes, maximum news per post, and save.

3. Operating models

Model	Reader component	Writer component	Billing behaviour
Manual	Staff check the site	Staff paste into the group	Grows with staff hours
iPaaS (Zapier, Make)	RSS trigger	Third party WhatsApp connector or API	Grows with tasks or credits
Group bot (9bot)	Integrated	Bot as group admin	Flat subscription

Quoted reference prices from the tutorial: for Zapier, US$19.99 monthly on a yearly contract buys the Pro tier's 750 tasks; Make credits consumed per module action and expiring at term end; 9bot at US$35 per month for three months, then US$70.

4. Controls

Temporal control. Three schedule modes: fixed interval for continuous publishing; two default digest slots (06:00, 18:00); custom times aligned to a section's own rhythm.
Volume control. A per-post maximum.
Routing control. One category feed per group; WordPress provides per-category feeds natively.
Surface control. Group configured so only admins send messages.
Feedback control. Active members and exits from 9bot Reports, reviewed after each change.

5. Out of scope

WhatsApp Channels. The tutorial reports no native RSS in Channels and no posting through the Meta API (verified 9 October 2026).

6. Operational checklist

Feed URL validated.
Group connected, relay holds admin.
Schedule mode chosen and written down with its reason.
Interval and cap set.
Admins-only messaging enabled.
Owner named; review date booked.

References

Source tutorial: https://9bot.com.br/en/how-to-set-up-rss-feed-whatsapp/
Paper on member data in company groups, 2026: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/ZG9U7
Paper on fraud links in groups, 2026: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/CYP2G
Research notes index: https://9-bot.github.io/whatsapp-group-security-research/

9bot · https://9bot.com.br/en/how-to-set-up-rss-feed-whatsapp/