Yes. When you sign up you won't be asked for payment information at all.
That said, if you want to support F5Bot's development, as of 2024, some paid features are also now offered.
I made F5Bot so I could use it myself. After a couple months of usage, I decided to share. It doesn't cost much to put it up for everyone to benefit.
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.
Each account is allowed a maximum of 200 keywords. If you need more than that, you can upgrade to a paid tier from the "Account" tab. Please don't create multiple accounts to subvert the limit.
Additionally, if a keyword is hit more than 50 times in a 24 hour period, it will be disabled. You can manually re-add the keyword 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.
You can upgrade to a paid tier, and I will increase your daily hits limit to 1,000.
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.
Semantic alerts use 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 an Ultra tier feature. See the Semantic Alerts Documentation for details.
Yes. Paid users can configure webhook URLs to have alerts posted directly into Slack or Discord channels. You can set this up from your account page.
Yes. Power Users can use the in-username flag to match only on the author's username. See the Power User 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, Power Users can use the in-title, in-body, or in-url flags. See the Power User Documentation for details.
Yes. Power Users and above can access personalized RSS and JSON feeds of their alerts. You can find your feed URLs on your account page. See the Power User 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 Power User flags) will stop generating matches until you resubscribe.
You can disable individual alerts from your dashboard by toggling them off. Paid users also have the option to set their email delivery to "Don't send emails" from their account page, which lets you receive alerts only via RSS, JSON, or webhooks.
Yes. Power Users 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 Power User Documentation for details.
Yes. Power Users can choose scheduled email delivery from their 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 Power User Documentation for details.
Yes. Power Users can use the mass upload feature to add, update, or delete keywords in bulk by uploading a CSV file.
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.