Where F5Bot stops being enough

Most people watching for their own name on the internet started with F5Bot. It has run since 2017, it sends over 430,000 alerts a day, and it does exactly what it says: it checks Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters for your keywords and emails you when they show up.

We are not going to pretend it is bad. It is one of the few tools in this category that has never tried to be more than it is, and the free tier is genuinely free rather than a trial wearing a disguise. If it covers what you need, use it.

This is about the specific line where it stops.

What the free tier actually gives youCopy Anchor Link

Read from f5bot.com/tiers on 5 September 2026 — we keep a fuller breakdown on our F5Bot pricing page. There are three separate caps and most people only notice the first:

Two things there catch people out.

The per-keyword cap bites before the keyword cap does. Ten results a day per keyword means one moderately busy term — a competitor's name, a common category phrase — hits its ceiling by lunchtime and goes quiet, while your other four keywords carry on. From the outside that looks like a slow day, not a limit.

And the free tier is labelled "personal use only." That is on the pricing page, next to the word Free. Plenty of companies are quietly running brand monitoring on it. That is between them and F5Bot's terms, but it is worth knowing that it is a term rather than an oversight.

The paid tiers, and the one number that surprises everyoneCopy Anchor Link

Silver at $9.99 is the best value in this entire category and nothing else comes close. Twenty keywords, five-minute delivery, ad-free, with keyword filtering and full post text. If your job is "tell me when someone says our name on Reddit," you can stop reading here and go and pay F5Bot ten dollars.

The number that surprises people is further down the table. The API and webhooks are on Platinum, at $214.99 a month. Not Gold. RSS and JSON feeds arrive at Gold ($49.99), and Slack or Discord delivery starts there too, but anything programmatic — anything that lets your own code or an assistant read your mentions — is the $214.99 tier.

Worth knowing too: AI filtering is a Gold feature, it is a keep-or-drop decision against a description you write rather than a score, and it is metered. The first $10 a month of token usage is included; beyond that you are billed by consumption on top of the plan.

The four places people actually outgrow itCopy Anchor Link

1. Three sources is three sources. Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters, on every tier including Diamond. There is no plan that adds LinkedIn, X, YouTube or GitHub, because that is not what F5Bot is. The moment your buyers are somewhere else, no amount of money fixes it.

2. Below Gold, every match looks equally important. A passing joke and someone actively asking which tool to buy arrive as identical emails. At ten a week that is fine. At two hundred a week it becomes a filter rule, and a filter rule is where alerting quietly dies — the mail keeps arriving, nobody reads it, and no dashboard tells you that happened. Gold's AI filtering helps, and it is a keep-or-drop decision rather than a ranking, so a busy day is still a flat list.

3. The email is the end of the road. There is nowhere to assign a mention, no way to see that a colleague already replied, and no record of what you did. For one person that is fine. For two it becomes a spreadsheet, and then it becomes nothing.

4. Your code cannot see it until $214.99. This is the one that matters if you want an assistant involved. Until Platinum, your mentions live in an inbox and nowhere else.

Where we fit, stated plainlyCopy Anchor Link

FishOut's free plan is 10 keywords, also on Reddit and Hacker News — plus Bluesky, GitHub and Google News. The differences:

F5Bot wins on Lobsters, which we do not cover at all, and on price above the free tier, where $9.99 for twenty keywords is unbeatable.

We win on the developer surface and the shared inbox: the API, the MCP server and webhooks are on our free plan rather than at $214.99, and mentions land somewhere a second person can pick them up.

On judgement we are ahead, and it is worth saying why. Our scoring runs on every plan, including Free, and is not metered: what is capped is relevant mentions, and only posts that pass triage count. F5Bot's AI filtering starts on Gold at $49.99, and ranks nothing — it keeps or drops.

So which should you use?Copy Anchor Link

Stay on F5Bot if you watch a handful of terms on Reddit and Hacker News, you read the emails yourself, and nobody else needs to act on them. Pay the $9.99 — it is the correct answer for a lot of people and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

Look at us when one of four things happens: your buyers turn out to be on LinkedIn, TikTok or X too — that is our $19 Plus plan rather than the free one, so it is a real comparison against F5Bot's $9.99 Silver — the volume outgrows the time you have to read it, a second person needs to act on a mention, or you want an assistant or your own code to see the feed without paying $214.99 for the privilege.

Our free plan covers the same two main sources, so the honest way to decide is to run both for a fortnight on the same keywords and see which one surfaces something you acted on. There is a side-by-side on our FishOut vs F5Bot page, and our own pricing is all on one page.

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F5Bot's tiers and limits here were read from its own pricing page on 5 September 2026, and the scale figures from its homepage. Pricing in this category moves, so check before you commit. If anything above is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.