How Do You Track Brand Mentions Without a Subscription? Reddit, Hacker News, Bluesky, TikTok

You can do it inside the API you already pay for. On TrueScrape a mention monitor is charged per check: 1 credit for each platform it calls, nothing per mention found, and no separate plan to sign up for. Watching a term on seven platforms every 6 hours costs at most 28 credits a day. If you only want to know who is talking about you right now, the free brand mentions checker answers that in a browser without an account.

Here is how the paid tools work and what they charge, which platforms can be watched without logging in, what a check costs, and how to start.

How do the paid brand monitoring tools work?

They all do the same three things: search a set of platforms for your term on a schedule, remember what they have already shown you, and alert you when something new appears. What differs is which platforms they search and how they price it. Every one of them is a monthly subscription, priced by plan tier and number of keywords, whether or not anyone mentions you that month.

These are their published prices, read from each tool's pricing page on 1 November 2026. They are their figures, not ours, and they change.

Tool	Cheapest paid plan	What it searches
F5Bot	Free tier; Silver $12.99/month, Gold $49.99/month	Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters
Syften	Entry $29.95/month; Standard $49.95; Pro $119.95	Reddit, Hacker News, forums and other communities; X and YouTube are paid add-ons ($40 and $20 a month)
Octolens	Pro $159/month, billed annually; Scale $499	Reddit, Hacker News, Bluesky, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, GitHub and more
Brand24	Individual $249/month, or $199/month billed annually	Social media, news, blogs and the wider web
Mention	No price shown on its pricing page; it says annual billing saves $360	Social media and the wider web

The cheap end is good at what it does. F5Bot's free tier is a fine way to watch Reddit and Hacker News by email, and if those two are all you need, use it. Going wider costs more, but less than it looks for some platforms: Syften's Standard plan covers Bluesky, and its YouTube add-on is $20 a month. The jump to hundreds comes with TikTok and Threads, which in this table only Octolens and Brand24 cover.

What does a TrueScrape mention monitor watch?

Seven platforms, all read the way a logged-out visitor would see them:

• Reddit: posts, newest first.
• Hacker News: stories and comments. On Hacker News a comment is usually how a product gets mentioned, so comments count there.
• Bluesky: posts, newest first.
• YouTube: videos whose title or description names you.
• Threads: posts.
• Instagram: posts carrying your hashtag. This is the set of posts Instagram shows for the tag, not every post that uses it.
• TikTok: videos under your hashtag.

The hashtag is made from your term: Acme becomes #acme, a domain like acme.com becomes #acme, and a product name with a dot keeps it as one word, so Next.js becomes #nextjs.

Every result has to contain your term as a whole word, case-insensitive, in its title, text or description. acme matches "Acme's launch" but not "acmes". In languages written without spaces, such as Chinese or Japanese, the term only has to appear. Search on YouTube and Threads is loose, and without that check a large share of what comes back would not mention you at all. Hashtag results skip the check, because the platform filing a post under your tag is the match.

Two honest limits. Instagram and TikTok show a window of posts per tag, not a full history, so a small brand's tag is covered well and a busy one can miss posts between checks. And YouTube search results and Instagram top posts carry no date, so once in a while an older video or post can surface as new when the platform reorders them.

Why are X and LinkedIn missing?

Because neither offers logged-out access to search, and TrueScrape never logs in. Searching X requires an account. LinkedIn post search sits behind a login wall. Every way around that means using a logged-in session or someone's cookies, which is the line we do not cross. Public, logged-out data only is the posture the rest of the product is built on, and a mentions feature is not a reason to drop it.

If X or LinkedIn are where your customers talk, a paid tool that holds accounts on those platforms will cover them and we will not. Octolens lists both. That is a real reason to pay for one.

The rest of the list grows. A source is added whenever there is a logged-out way to read it, and each addition is on the changelog. X and LinkedIn are the two that will not be, for the reason above.

What does a check cost?

A check calls each of your platforms once, and each call is priced like any other request:

• 1 credit per platform that answered. A platform that answered is charged even if nothing in its results mentions you, because the search ran and returned data.
• A platform that failed costs nothing. If Reddit times out on one check, that check costs 6 credits, not 7.
• Nothing per mention. A check that finds forty new mentions costs the same as one that finds none.

So the arithmetic for a full seven-platform monitor:

How often	Checks a day	Most it can cost a day	About a month
Every 6 hours (the default)	4	28 credits	840 credits
Daily	1	7 credits	210 credits
Hourly	24	168 credits	5,040 credits

Those are ceilings. Turn off a platform where nobody talks about you and the figure drops by a seventh. The rate per credit is on the pricing page; at the 6-hour default the monthly total is a small fraction of the cheapest plan in the table above. The money comes out of the same credit balance as the rest of your API usage, so there is no second bill and nothing to cancel.

Can you check brand mentions for free?

Yes, once at a time. The brand mentions checker is the same search a monitor runs: it takes a term, searches the seven platforms, and streams the results back platform by platform. It is free and needs no account, with two limits:

• 3 checks a day.
• Up to 10 mentions shown per check, with at least one from every platform that found something. When there are more, the page tells you how many more there are.

What it does not do is remember. Run it tomorrow and it shows you everything again, including what you saw today. Telling you only what is new is the part a monitor adds.

What happens after you start a monitor?

The first check runs within a couple of minutes. It records what is already out there and alerts you about none of it, so you are not flooded with a backlog the moment you start; the dashboard lists those posts separately, under "Already out there when you started watching". If you ran the free checker first, that check reuses its results and costs nothing. From the next check on, only mentions it has never seen before count as new. A post that drops out of a platform's results and comes back is not announced twice. For platforms that date their posts, anything older than seven days is ignored.

New mentions land in two places:

• The dashboard. The Mentions page is an inbox: new since your last visit at the top, then earlier this week. One tab per term, plus an All tab, and a running count of credits used this week.
• A webhook, if you want one. Give the monitor a URL and each check that finds something sends exactly the new mentions to it, with the platform and the term. Nothing is sent when nothing is new.

How does this compare to F5Bot, Syften and Brand24?

It is narrower than the full listening suites and cheaper to run than most of them. If you need X, LinkedIn, news or sentiment, buy one of them. If you want new posts on these seven platforms as a feed or a webhook, paid per check, this is the smaller tool. Each comparison below lists what the other tool does better, with prices read from its own page:

• Brand monitoring tools compared, all seven in one table
• F5Bot and F5Bot alternatives
• Syften and Octolens
• Brand24, Mention and Awario, Brand24 alternatives and Mention alternatives

The mention monitoring page has the setup for founders and for developers side by side.

How do you start?

1. Run your brand, product or domain through the free checker. If the results are worth watching, choose Watch this term.
2. That opens the Mentions page in the dashboard with the term filled in. Pick how often (every 6 hours by default) and which platforms, and start watching. The form shows the daily ceiling before you confirm.
3. If you build on the API rather than the dashboard, create the same monitor with one request and a webhook URL, using the same API key and credits as every other endpoint. Agents can do it through the MCP server's create_monitor tool. The monitors documentation has the request, the webhook payload and the pricing worked out.

A competitor's name works as a term too. It costs the same, and it is often the more useful feed. The checker sits with the other free tools, which look up profiles, posts and transcripts the same way.