Troubleshooting

Common issues and how to fix them.

“Can only send testing emails to your own email address”

Cause: Resend free tier restriction.

Fix: Set RECIPIENT_EMAIL to the same email you used to sign up for Resend, or verify a custom domain on Resend (Dashboard → Domains → Add Domain → add DNS records).

“GEMINI_API_KEY quota: limit 0”

Cause: New Gemini API keys take a few minutes to activate. Some keys may not work at all until billing and the API are enabled.

Fix: Try these steps in order:

Wait 5–10 minutes — new keys sometimes just need time to activate
Enable the Generative Language API — go to Google Cloud Console → search “Generative Language API” → click Enable for the project linked to your API key
Add billing details — go to Google AI Studio → Settings → Billing and add your billing info. You can still select the free tier — adding billing just activates your key, you won’t be charged unless you exceed the free limits

In the meantime, Richfolio automatically falls back to gap-based recommendations — the brief will still be delivered, just without AI analysis.

“fetch failed — internal-error” for a ticker

Cause: Yahoo Finance occasionally has issues with specific tickers (especially less common ones like BIPC).

Fix: No action needed. The ticker is skipped and everything else continues normally. This is an intermittent Yahoo Finance issue.

GitHub Actions shows empty secrets

Cause: Secrets were added at the wrong level.

Fix: Make sure you added secrets at the repository level: Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → Repository secrets. Not at the environment level.

No news returned

Cause: NewsAPI free tier only returns articles from the last 24 hours. Some tickers (especially ETFs and small-caps) rarely appear in news headlines.

Fix: This is normal behavior. The brief runs fine without news for those tickers. AI analysis will note “no recent news” in its recommendations.

Telegram message not received

Cause: You haven’t started a conversation with your bot yet.

Fix: Open Telegram, find your bot by username, and send it any message (e.g., “hi”). The Telegram Bot API requires the user to initiate contact before the bot can send messages. After that, re-run Richfolio.

“Missing config.json” error

Cause: config.json doesn’t exist in the project root.

Fix: Copy the example config:

cp config.example.json config.json

Then edit it with your portfolio data. In GitHub Actions, make sure the CONFIG_JSON secret contains valid JSON.

Brief runs but email is empty or missing sections

Cause: One or more API keys are missing or invalid.

Fix: Check your .env file. The brief adapts to what’s available:

Without NEWS_API_KEY → no news section
Without GEMINI_API_KEY → gap-based recommendations instead of AI
Without TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN → email only (no Telegram)

All combinations are valid — only RESEND_API_KEY and RECIPIENT_EMAIL are required.