Building a Daily Google News API Monitor in Python

I wanted a small, local tool that would search the news for brand mentions. I didnt want to pay over $100 a month so I decided to build my own.

What I created was a tool that would search the news with a Google News API every morning for a list of keywords, run each result through a LLM for sentiment and a one-sentence summary, save everything to SQLite, and ping me the results on Slack/a web app.

The whole project came out to about 1,000 lines of Python across ten files. It is a Flask app with a SQLite database and a single HTML dashboard.

Here's how it's wired together, with the code that matters from each layer.

Repo: google-news-monitor on GitHub. Install instructions at the bottom.