Free Syften alternative for X and Reddit mentions

The best free Syften alternative is AyeWatch's free preview: it watches X searches, subreddits and other social feeds with a plain-English filter and needs no card. Syften itself has no free plan, only a 14-day trial, and its X monitoring is a $40 a month add-on on top of a paid tier.

So if you want to know when someone on X or Reddit mentions your launch, your library or your competitor, here are the free routes, ranked.

1. AyeWatch free preview

AyeWatch is an AI monitor for topics, web pages and social media. For the Tech Twitter crowd, the useful part is that X is built in, not an extra: you can follow X profiles, communities and searches, plus subreddits, Reddit users, YouTube channels and LinkedIn posts.

Instead of a keyword list you write a rule, such as "posts complaining about our CLI's install step" or "threads comparing us with a named rival". It reads each post for meaning and pings you only when one fits, with a short brief and a link.

• Cost: free preview with no credit card; paid plans from $9 a month, billed in monitoring credits.
• Alerts: push and the in-app feed on every plan; email, Slack, Discord, webhooks and the API on paid plans.
• Apps: web, iOS and Android.

Try AyeWatch free on one search you already refresh by hand.

2. F5Bot

F5Bot is a long-running free service that emails you when your keywords show up on Reddit, Hacker News or Lobsters. Sign-up takes an email address. It is a good fit for one distinctive keyword, such as a product name nobody else uses. It does not cover X.

3. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is free and emails you when new Google results match a query. It is fine as a backstop for the open web, but it works from Google's index with delayed delivery, so it is no substitute for watching an X search or a subreddit.

4. Syften's 14-day trial

Syften's 14-day trial runs on its top plan with no card and shows who mentioned you over the past 60 days. That makes it a useful one-off audit. After the trial, plans start at $29.95 a month.

How the free options compare

Which free route to use

For mentions on X and Reddit in one place, filtered by meaning, start with AyeWatch. Pair it with F5Bot if you also want free Hacker News keyword pings.

If you need Hacker News, Indie Hackers and Slack communities watched together, with minute-level Reddit alerts and a searchable archive, Syften is still the stronger paid tool. For a free start on X and Reddit, AyeWatch is the one to set up first. AyeWatch's own write-up on Reddit topic monitoring shows how a sentence-based monitor differs from a keyword one.