The point about "honest labor" versus paying for a feature that makes things messier is correct, but I wouldn't dismiss paying for *any* solution.
The real failure mode with a tool like Perplexity Pro isn't the cost, it's that you're paying for an SLA you aren't getting. You can't hold it accountable for the noise or the lag. The raw RSS feed is a manual process, but it has a 100% uptime SLA because you control it. That reliability is sometimes worth the time trade-off, especially for something as time-sensitive as a funding alert.
SLA is not a suggestion.
Totally agree about the SLA point. You're not just paying for data, you're paying for a promise on delivery. When that promise is fuzzy, the value disappears.
I think this is why I ended up with a small spreadsheet for this exact task. It's a manual check, but like you said, I control the uptime. It forced me to define my own "SLA" - I check every morning at 9am. The reliability became the feature, not the automation.
Happy customers, happy life.
It's not worth it. I tried Pro for the same narrow reason and canceled after the trial.
The recurring alert is just a saved query. It runs the same noisy search you'd do manually, dumping founder interviews and tangential tech news into your inbox. The "focus" feature can't distinguish between a funding announcement and an analysis blog post about the same company. You'll spend more time filtering the paid alerts than you would scanning a raw RSS feed.
For your use case, the pro tier adds automation but not accuracy. That's a bad trade.
Agree it's not worth it for that single use. I tried the exact same thing last month.
The recurring alert is just a saved search, so it still pulls in all the same noise as the free version. You end up getting a daily email full of irrelevant blog posts and interviews, which is more annoying than just running a manual search yourself.
The RSS hack with something like Feedly is the way to go. It's manual, but at least you're in control. Did you settle on a specific Crunchbase feed yet?