Upwork job alerts in Slack and email, now that the RSS feeds are gone

Upwork used to let any search produce an RSS feed, and a lot of freelancers piped those feeds into Slack, Zapier or a feed reader so they would hear about new jobs quickly. Upwork stopped supporting RSS after 20 August 2024. The feed URLs no longer return jobs, which is why any tool or Zap built on them went quiet.

Upwork's own suggestions for what to use instead are saved searches, notification settings, recommended jobs in the feed, and Job Digest emails. The digest emails are only for Rising Talent and Top Rated freelancers, and Upwork's instant job alerts require a Freelancer Plus membership and are based on jobs similar to ones you have already applied to, rather than on a search you define.

Source: Upwork Help Center, RSS deprecation and How to get instant job alerts.

You connect your Upwork account with read-only OAuth and save one or more searches. Each search is checked through Upwork's official GraphQL API every 60 seconds, on our servers, so nothing runs in your browser and alerts keep arriving while your laptop is closed.

Every new posting is screened against the search's filters, then scored against your Upwork profile. Only postings that clear both are sent to you. Set a search to alert only and it tells you about matches without drafting anything: alerts cost no credits, only creating the search does (5 credits). Switch it to auto-draft and each alert arrives with a proposal already written.

Alerts go to a Slack channel through an incoming webhook, to email, or both. A busy search can match several jobs in a single check, so alerts are grouped into one digest instead of one message per job: a digest is sent after 90 seconds with nothing new, or at most 10 minutes after the first job in it.

Each alert carries the job title, budget, client country, which search found it, a match score from 0 to 1, and, when a draft was written, its opening line, so you can decide from a lock screen whether it is worth opening. Setup guides: Slack and email.

Upwork's automation policy specifically names job alert and watcher tools that scrape or run searches, auto-refreshers and page monitors as the kind of browser extension that can get an account restricted. Its compliant route for automation is an approved API key.

Nibwright uses that route: an approved key, the official GraphQL API, and a read-only OAuth grant you can revoke from Upwork's settings at any time. It never loads upwork.com in your browser, never asks for your password, and makes one API request per search per check, at most every 60 seconds. The full reasoning is in Is Upwork automation allowed?