What Is F5Bot and What Does It Do?

Updated

F5Bot is a keyword monitoring tool that watches Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobsters for terms you specify and emails you when they appear in a new post or comment. It fits anyone who needs to catch mentions of a brand, product, competitor, or topic as they happen—solo developers, PR and marketing teams, and community managers. Sign-up requires only an email address, and the site states no credit card is needed.

How it works

The setup follows three steps described on the site:

  1. Create an account — sign up with an email address.
  2. Add keywords — enter the brand names, products, or topics you want tracked across all three platforms.
  3. Receive alerts — get an email when a keyword appears in a new post or comment.

Monitoring covers posts and comments in every subreddit on Reddit, plus Hacker News and Lobsters. The site says platforms are checked every few minutes and that it has operated since 2017, delivering 430,000+ alerts daily.

What you can control

Beyond plain keyword matching, F5Bot offers several ways to cut noise and route alerts:

Feature What it does
AI filtering Describe what you want in natural language; AI evaluates each new discussion
Advanced filtering Narrow by subreddit, exclude unwanted terms, require co-occurring keywords
Slack & Discord integration Send alerts to team channels via webhooks
RSS, JSON & API access Feed alerts into existing tools and workflows
Flexible email delivery Instant alerts, batched with a delay, or a daily digest at chosen times

Who it's for

The site names four use cases:

  • Brand monitoring — know when your company or product is discussed so you can respond early.
  • Competitor intelligence — track competitor names and products to see how they're perceived and spot trends.
  • Lead generation — find people actively asking for what you offer, at the moment of intent.
  • Content & PR tracking — see when your blog posts, open-source tools, or press coverage are shared.

Deciding whether to use it

F5Bot is a good fit if your audience or market talks on Reddit, Hacker News, or Lobsters and you want email or channel alerts without building your own scraper. It is less suited to monitoring platforms outside those three, or to needs that require real-time streaming rather than checks every few minutes.

The site advertises both a free tier and paid plans ("Simple plans for every need," with a Pricing page linked), but the supplied material does not list prices or what each plan includes—check the Pricing page before committing to a paid tier.