F5Bot
Free Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters alerts, running since 2017
Entry price
Free — no credit card, no stated keyword limit
Typical annual
$0, or $119.88/year at Silver
Free trial
Not a trial — a permanent free tier
Contract
No
About F5Bot
F5Bot is the honest floor of this whole category. It emails you when your keywords appear on Reddit, Hacker News or Lobsters, it costs nothing, it needs no card, and it has been doing exactly that since 2017 — over 430,000 alerts a day by its own count. Before paying $159 a month for a tool whose headline sources are Reddit and Hacker News, it is worth knowing this exists. What the paid tools give you that F5Bot does not is relevance scoring, sentiment, searchable history, API access, team workflow and coverage beyond three sites. Those are real reasons to spend money — but only once you have established that the free option does not already solve your problem. If you need more keywords or better delivery, Silver at $9.99 gives you 20 keywords and Gold at $49.99 gives you 200, both adding RSS and JSON feeds, Slack and Discord, and control over whether alerts arrive instantly, batched or as a daily digest.
Full specification
Pricing & Model
- Entry price
- Free — no credit card, no stated keyword limit
- Median annual cost
- $0, or $119.88/year at Silver
- Pricing model
- Free tier plus two paid tiers by keyword count
- Free trial
- Not a trial — a permanent free tier
- Contract required
- No
- Overage pricing
- Not applicable — flat tiers
Searches / Topics / Queries
- What they call it
- Keywords / alerts
- Entry tier limit
- Free: Reddit, HN and Lobsters, email alerts, basic filtering
- Mid tier limit
- Silver $9.99/mo: 20 keywords, RSS/JSON, Slack and Discord, flexible timing
- Enterprise limit
- Gold $49.99/mo: 200 keywords, same delivery options
- Boolean support
- Basic filtering only — not a Boolean query engine
Mentions / Results
- Counting method
- Keyword matches, delivered as alerts
- Entry tier
- Unmetered on the free tier
- Mid tier
- Across 20 keywords
- Enterprise tier
- Across 200 keywords
- Historical lookback
- None — alerts are forward-looking only
Users & Seats
- Entry tier users
- Single account
- Mid tier users
- Single account
- Enterprise users
- Single account
- Extra seat cost
- Not applicable — this is not a team product
Key Features
- Sentiment analysis
- No
- Emotion detection
- No
- Intent classification
- No
- Entity extraction
- No
- Image recognition
- No
- Webhooks
- RSS and JSON feeds on paid tiers, rather than true webhooks
- API access
- JSON feed on paid tiers; no full API
- Publishing tools
- No
- News / media coverage
- No — three community sites only
- Language support
- English-language communities
- Interface languages
- EN
Best For
- Primary audience
- Anyone who wants to know when their product is mentioned on Reddit or Hacker News and does not need analytics, history or a team workflow — and every buyer who should test the free option before signing a paid contract for the same sources.
- Regional focus
- Global, English-language communities
Similar platforms
Other social listening & media monitoring tools, cheapest published price first.