F5Bot vs Syften Pricing for Reddit and Hacker News Alerts

Short answer: F5Bot is the cheaper tool and Syften is the wider one. F5Bot watches Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters, with paid tiers at $9.99, $49.99 and $214.99 a month and a free plan for personal use. Syften costs $29.95, $49.95 or $119.95 a month and adds Stack Exchange, GitHub, Indie Hackers, Mastodon, Bluesky, podcasts and the open web, with a stated Reddit delay under one minute. If you only need Reddit and Hacker News keyword emails, buy F5Bot Silver or Gold. If you sell to developers across many communities, buy Syften.

Every price, limit and delay below was read from f5bot.com/tiers and syften.com in September 2026. Neither vendor prints a number we had to estimate, so this post estimates nothing.

F5Bot vs Syften pricing at a glance

How much does F5Bot cost?

F5Bot sells five tiers. The free plan gives you 5 keywords, a cap of 10 matches per keyword per day and 20 alerts a day, with alerts arriving up to two hours after F5Bot finds a match and a small ad in each email. It is labeled personal use only, so a company tracking its own brand belongs on a paid plan.

Silver is $9.99 a month, or $109 a year with one month free. It raises you to 20 keywords and 100 alerts a day, cuts the delay to at most five minutes, and adds keyword filtering, full post text in the email, alert grouping and ad-free emails. Gold at $49.99 a month ($549 a year) is the plan most teams outgrow Silver into: 200 keywords, 5,000 alerts a day, instant or scheduled delivery, 90 days of match history, RSS and JSON feeds, one Slack or Discord integration, bulk keyword upload and AI filtering.

Platinum is $214.99 a month ($2,364 a year) with 300 keywords, 200,000 daily alerts, three Slack or Discord integrations, and the only self-serve access to the API and webhooks. Diamond starts at $500 a month and is custom.

One cost line is easy to miss. F5Bot's AI filtering includes the first $10 a month of token usage, and anything past that is billed by consumption on top of the plan. If you lean on AI filtering for a noisy keyword, budget a little above the sticker price.

How much does Syften cost?

Syften has three published plans and a custom tier. Entry is $29.95 a month for 3 community filters, 100 community results a day, 1 web filter and 7 days of archive search. A filter here is a saved search query, not a single word, so one filter can hold your brand, its misspellings and a few exclusions.

Standard at $49.95 a month moves you to 20 community filters, 200 results a day, 5 web filters and a month of archive, and it adds Slack, AI filtering and API access. Twitter and YouTube monitoring are sold as paid add-ons from this plan up. PRO at $119.95 a month gives 100 filters, 500 community results a day, 20 web filters, unlimited archive, webhooks and an MCP connection for AI tools.

The trial is on PRO, runs 14 days and needs no card, and when you start it Syften shows who mentioned you in the previous 60 days. That backfill is the fastest way to judge whether a tool finds your conversations before you pay for it.

Is F5Bot cheaper than Syften?

Yes, at the bottom of the ladder, and by a lot. F5Bot Silver at $9.99 is about a third of Syften Entry at $29.95, and it gives you 20 keywords against Syften's 3 filters. In the middle the two meet: F5Bot Gold at $49.99 and Syften Standard at $49.95 are four cents apart. At the top Syften is cheaper, because PRO with webhooks costs $119.95 while the first F5Bot plan with webhooks is Platinum at $214.99.

So the cheaper tool depends on which feature you need. If you need API or webhooks, Syften wins on price. If you need many plain keywords and email alerts, F5Bot wins.

Is Syften better than F5Bot?

Syften is better for coverage and F5Bot is better for simple volume. Syften reads a long list of developer and founder communities that F5Bot never touches, including Stack Overflow, GitHub, Indie Hackers, Dev.to, Discourse forums and Slack communities, plus public websites. It also states a sub-minute Reddit target on every plan, where F5Bot's lower two tiers carry a delay of up to two hours or five minutes.

F5Bot is better if Reddit and Hacker News are the whole job. It is cheaper per keyword, Gold's 200 keywords go far for a lead-generation team, and its site dates back to 2017 with a narrow, dependable scope. Neither vendor advertises sentiment scoring, and neither covers news outlets as a source you can alert on. Both are built to surface a thread so a person can reply to it.

Which one should you buy?

• A solo founder watching a product name on Reddit and Hacker News: F5Bot Silver at $9.99.
• A growth team mining Reddit for buying-intent threads across dozens of phrases: F5Bot Gold at $49.99 for the keyword count.
• A developer-tools company that needs Stack Overflow, GitHub and Discourse too: Syften Standard at $49.95.
• Anyone piping matches into their own system: Syften PRO at $119.95, since F5Bot's webhooks start at $214.99.

F5Bot delivers everything by email until Gold, so the alerts tend to scatter across whoever set up each keyword. If your team reads several mailboxes, a unified inbox that pulls every IMAP account into one place keeps those alerts from getting lost before someone replies.

What is the best F5Bot alternative for brand monitoring?

Both tools answer "did someone just post this word?" They do not tell you how the conversation about your brand is going. If what you need is reputation monitoring rather than reply-bait, you want sentiment on each mention, news coverage in the same feed, and an alert when volume jumps well above normal rather than on every match.

That is what EyeOut is for. It scans Google News, Reddit and Mastodon on every plan, and Hacker News, Lemmy and Apple Podcasts show notes from Growth up, twice an hour. Each mention is scored for sentiment toward your brand and grouped into themes in a daily digest, and on Growth the crisis radar compares each keyword's last 24 hours with its own 7-day baseline before it alerts you. Plans are $59, $149 and $399 a month billed yearly. It is slower than Syften's sub-minute Reddit feed and it does not read Lobsters, Stack Overflow or GitHub, so a developer-relations team that replies to threads in minutes should stay with Syften or F5Bot. For the full Reddit comparison, see the Reddit monitoring tool page, and for every F5Bot tier in one place, the F5Bot pricing breakdown. If a 30-minute scan is fast enough for you, the brand monitoring refresh intervals page compares it with every other vendor.

Questions to ask before you pay

• How many separate phrases do we track, counting misspellings and competitor names? That decides keywords versus filters.
• Do we reply within minutes, or read a digest once a day? That decides whether delay matters.
• Do we need Slack, an API or webhooks, and on which plan does each start?
• Which communities do our buyers actually use beyond Reddit?
• Do we need to know whether the talk is positive or negative, or only that it exists?