A public account of what this is, how it works, what it costs, and where it's going.
We have enough of news and news outlets. What we don't have is a single, accessible, multilingual (TBA) digest without the noise or bias (TBA) of any one outlet.
Lanka Lens is my personal project built to learn and test out the latest and greatest tech available to us.
The digest is free to use and will stay free as long as it's viable to run. I will have to ask for donations later.
Lanka Lens pulls from 10 RSS feeds across three languages. Stories are translated, merged, and summarised by AI before delivery.
Some sources don't publish native RSS feeds. For these, Lanka Lens uses rss.app to generate compatible feeds. Currently on a trial — Basic plan ($9.99/month) planned.
Full transparency on operational costs.
| Service | What it does | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Google Gemini API | AI summarisation and translation | Free (1,000 req/day) |
| Railway | Bot hosting — runs 24/7 | ~$5 / month |
| Supabase | Subscriber database | Free tier |
| GitHub Pages | This website | Free |
| rss.app | RSS feeds for sites without native feeds (e.g. BBC Sinhala) | $9.99 / month |
Current: ~$10 USD/month · Planned: ~$15-$40/month
Built in Python. Open source on GitHub.
Lanka Lens collects no personal information. There is no login, no account, and no tracking of individual users.
This site uses Google Analytics to count anonymous visitors — how many people visit, which pages they read, and roughly where in the world they are. IP addresses are anonymised before they reach Google, meaning your precise location is never stored.
Google Analytics sets cookies in your browser to distinguish unique visits. No other cookies are used on this site.
If you'd prefer not to be counted, you can install the Google Analytics opt-out extension in your browser.
If you subscribe via the Telegram bot, Lanka Lens stores your Telegram user ID and username in a secure database. This is used solely to deliver your daily digest and to count subscribers. It is never sold, shared, or used for any other purpose. You can delete your data at any time by sending /stop to the bot — this unsubscribes you and removes your record from the database.