F5Bot has a free tier you can use without ever entering payment information. It is intended for personal use, and it is a great way to try the service.
For higher limits, faster alerts, and advanced features, we offer paid plans.
I made F5Bot in 2017 so I could use it myself, then decided to share it. The free tier keeps that spirit alive for personal use. Paid plans fund ongoing development and cover the cost of running the service at scale.
Currently Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobste.rs.
You can use the only-url flag to specify which subreddits to monitor. You can use this flag multiple times. For example, to only get results from the /r/news and /r/worldnews subreddits, you would use these flags:
only-url=/r/news only-url=/r/worldnews
only-reddit only-url=/r/mysubreddit.This is because a match is valid if any of the only- flags apply. Since you have only-reddit, it matches everything on Reddit.
To fix this, simply remove the only-reddit flag. Your alert will then correctly only match content from the URL you specified.
For a more detailed explanation, please see Understanding "only-" Flags.
Yes. F5Bot scans both submissions and comments. See here for more info.
No. Keywords and phrases will match regardless of capitalization.
Yes. You can enter a partial URL as a keyword to track. Make sure you do not use the "whole" flag.
You can post your keyword or phrase on Reddit in the test subreddit. You should expect an email from F5Bot a couple minutes after you do.
The number of keywords you can monitor depends on your account tier. See the tiers page for the current limits of each plan. Please don't create multiple accounts to subvert the limit.
Additionally, each tier has a daily limit on how many alerts a single keyword can generate in a 24 hour period, as well as a daily limit on the total number of alerts across your whole account. A keyword that goes over its limit will be disabled. You can manually re-enable it from your account. Keep in mind that F5Bot is designed to alert you about fairly uncommon keywords or phrases. If you're trying to monitor a very popular brand, this might not be the right tool for you.
See here for more info on paid tiers.
F5Bot checks for new content every few minutes. After a post or comment appears on a monitored site, you can typically expect an alert within a few minutes.
AI filtering (previously called Semantic Alerts) uses AI to match content based on a natural language description instead of exact keywords. You describe what you are looking for, and the system evaluates new content against your criteria. This is available on select plans; see the tiers page for availability and the AI Filtering Documentation for details.
Yes. On plans with Slack/Discord integrations, you can configure webhook URLs to have alerts posted directly into Slack or Discord channels. You can set this up from your account page. See the tiers page for availability.
Yes. On paid plans, you can use the in-username flag to match only on the author's username. See the Paid Features Documentation for details.
You can use the no-url flag to skip results from specific subreddits. For example, to exclude /r/politics and /r/news, you would use these flags:
no-url=/r/politics/ no-url=/r/news/
F5Bot searches submission titles, URLs, and comment bodies. Your keyword may have matched in the URL or title even if it doesn't appear in the body text. If you want to limit where your keyword is searched, on paid plans you can use the in-title, in-body, or in-url flags. See the Paid Features Documentation for details.
Yes. Plans with feed access include personalized RSS and JSON feeds of your alerts. You can find your feed URLs on your account page. See the tiers page for availability and the Paid Features Documentation for details.
No. F5Bot does not support regular expressions or wildcards. Keywords are matched exactly as entered, including any special characters. See the keyword documentation for more info.
Your alerts will remain on your account, but any alerts using paid features (such as paid-only flags) will stop generating matches until you resubscribe.
You can disable individual alerts from your dashboard by toggling them off. On plans with scheduled email delivery, you can also set your email delivery to "Don't send emails" from your account page, which lets you receive alerts only via RSS, JSON, or webhooks. See the tiers page for availability.
Yes. On paid plans, you can use the group=name flag to organize alerts into groups. All alerts with the same group name will be bundled into a single email, separate from your other alerts. See the Paid Features Documentation for details.
Yes. On plans with scheduled email delivery, you can choose delivery times from your account page. You can set up to 3 delivery times per day and choose which days of the week each time slot applies to. See the tiers page for availability and the Paid Features Documentation for details.
Yes. On plans with mass upload, you can use the mass upload feature to add, update, or delete keywords in bulk by uploading a CSV file. See the tiers page for availability.
Free accounts cannot monitor very common words or phrases. If your keyword is rejected, you can upgrade to a paid tier, which removes this restriction.
The whole flag makes your keyword match only on whole words or phrases. Without it, a keyword like "thing" would also match "something" or "thingy". With the whole flag, it will only match when "thing" appears as a complete word. See the keyword documentation for more info.
Yes. Use the no-comments flag to only get posts, or the no-posts flag to only get comments. See the keyword documentation for a full list of flags.
Yes. F5Bot offers small text ads in alert emails. See our advertise with F5Bot page for details.
Maybe. Let me know if you have any ideas.