F5Bot
Free email alerts when your keywords appear on Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters.
About
F5Bot is the simplest possible social listening: give it keywords, and it emails you when they show up on Reddit, Hacker News or Lobsters. No dashboard, no analytics, no boolean logic — just a notification pipe that has run reliably since 2017.
The free tier covers 5 keywords with 20 alerts a day (delivery within ~2 hours), and paid tiers from $9.99/month add 5-minute delivery, Slack/Discord and AI filters. It's perfect for a solo founder watching a brand name. The honest limitation: matching is literal keyword only, so a popular term turns your inbox into a firehose you'll sort by hand.
What it can do
- Keyword monitoring on Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters
- Email alerts on new posts and comments
- Paid tiers add Slack/Discord delivery
- AI relevance filters on Gold and above
- RSS and JSON feeds on Gold and above
- API and webhooks on Platinum
Setup
- Create a free account at f5bot.com with your email.
- Add keywords: your brand, product, competitors, problem phrases.
- Confirm your email to activate alerts.
- Test by posting your keyword in a test subreddit.
- Upgrade to Silver or Gold if you need faster delivery or Slack integration.
Prerequisites
An email address. Nothing else.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (metrics tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: running since 2017; widely cited as the free baseline; free plan: 5 keywords, 20 alerts/day, ~2h delivery; AI filters on Gold+; literal keyword matching only — no boolean, no regex. Manual review: does one thing reliably; firehose risk on popular terms.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 6.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 9.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 6.0/10
- · running since 2017; widely cited as the free baseline
- · free plan: 5 keywords, 20 alerts/day, ~2h delivery; AI filters on Gold+
- · literal keyword matching only — no boolean, no regex
- · manual review: does one thing reliably; firehose risk on popular terms
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.