n8n + Claude API: automating competitive monitoring

The goal

Get a synthetic summary every morning of competitive announcements: sites, blogs and release notes browsed overnight, with the points worth a closer look.

Workflow architecture

Three layers in n8n:

1. Collection: HTTP Request nodes scheduled via Cron
2. Synthesis: HTTP node calling the Claude API with a structured prompt
3. Distribution: Slack or email depending on preferred channel

The prompt that works

I've iterated quite a bit. Three things that make a difference:

• Give a clear role: "You're a product analyst tracking competitor X..."
• Force a strict output format (JSON or sectioned Markdown). Without it, Claude varies its structure.
• Set an explicit length limit ("3 bullets max per item")

Cost in practice

Over a month of daily execution:

• Haiku: ~USD 0.30/month for ~50k input tokens per day
• Sonnet: ~USD 1.50/month for the same volume
• Opus: ~USD 7/month (reserve for analyses that really warrant it)

For pure monitoring, Haiku is enough. Sonnet when you want a real argued synthesis.

What not to do

Don't ask Claude to scrape. It's slow and unreliable. n8n has dedicated nodes (HTTP Request, HTML Extract) that do it better and cheaper.