Free keyword monitoring across Reddit and Hacker News
Short answer
F5Bot is a reddit keyword alerts tool positioned as: free keyword monitoring across reddit and hacker news. Pricing starts at $0 (Completely free, no paid plans).
Best for: Individual founders and marketers who need basic Reddit brand mention alerts for free and don't require a dashboard or reporting.
Worst for: Teams needing centralized monitoring, sentiment analysis, Slack notifications, or reliable uptime guarantees for mission-critical brand tracking.
vs MediaFast: F5Bot tells you when someone mentions your keyword on Reddit; MediaFast helps you figure out which subreddits to post in and what to say when you get there, making it a better fit for founders who want to do more than monitor.
F5Bot is a completely free Reddit and Hacker News monitoring service maintained by a single developer. You add keywords, and F5Bot emails you whenever those keywords appear in new Reddit posts or comments. There's no dashboard, no analytics, no clustering, no AI. It's a simple alert pipe and nothing more.
The tool has been running since around 2018 and has developed a loyal following among bootstrapped founders who can't justify a paid monitoring subscription. Because it's free and the notification lag is typically under 30 minutes, many people use it as a first line of defense for brand mention tracking on Reddit.
F5Bot positions itself as a utility, not a platform. You won't find a product roadmap, marketing site with case studies, or a support team. The developer is transparent about this being a side project, which means the tool could theoretically go down without warning. For teams that need reliability and SLAs, this is a real risk to consider.
Tier
Free
Starting At
$0/mo
Model
Completely free, no paid plans
Free Plan
Yes
F5Bot gets mentioned in r/entrepreneur and r/SaaS threads almost any time someone asks for free Reddit monitoring tools, and the response is almost universally positive given the price. The most common complaint is email overload when tracking broad keywords without enough subreddit filtering. A few users note worrying about the tool disappearing since it's a solo project, but most treat that as an acceptable risk for a free service.
Individual founders and marketers who need basic Reddit brand mention alerts for free and don't require a dashboard or reporting.
Teams needing centralized monitoring, sentiment analysis, Slack notifications, or reliable uptime guarantees for mission-critical brand tracking.
F5Bot tells you when someone mentions your keyword on Reddit; MediaFast helps you figure out which subreddits to post in and what to say when you get there, making it a better fit for founders who want to do more than monitor.
F5Bot
Reddit Keyword Alerts tool, free plan available, starting at $0/mo
MediaFast
Reddit research, subreddit discovery, and AI post generation in one platform. Free to start.
If F5Bot doesn't fit your use case, here are the strongest alternatives with specific reasons to consider each one.
Goes beyond alerts to help you find the right subreddits and generate posts that fit each community, so you can actually act on mentions rather than just log them.
Adds Slack integration, sentiment filtering, and a proper dashboard if you've outgrown email-only alerts.
Better for deep research and pain-point clustering if you want to understand not just when you're mentioned but what patterns emerge around your topic.
Covers Twitter, news, blogs, and Reddit together with analytics if you need cross-platform monitoring.
Specific answers about F5Bot pricing, features, and whether it's right for your use case.
Yes, completely free with no hidden paid tier. The developer runs it as a community service and funds it through occasional donations. There are no limits on keywords or alerts.
Most users report receiving alerts within 15 to 30 minutes of a keyword appearing on Reddit. During high-traffic periods the lag can stretch to an hour, but for a free tool the speed is genuinely impressive.
Yes, you can filter alerts to specific subreddits or exclude certain subreddits from your alerts. This is especially useful if a keyword you're tracking is also common in unrelated communities.
Since F5Bot is a solo developer project, there's no SLA or guaranteed recovery time. The tool has been reliable since 2018, but teams with critical monitoring needs should treat it as a secondary system rather than their primary brand monitoring solution.
F5Bot handles reddit keyword alerts. MediaFast handles the full Reddit loop: finding your subreddits, generating posts that fit each community, and building the Reddit presence that makes brand monitoring worthwhile in the first place.
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