An F5Bot Alternative With Free AI Filtering

By the RedditScout Team · Published July 8, 2026 · Updated July 19, 2026 · 6 min read

F5Bot is free, reliable, and a great place to start — we recommend it in our own guides. But "free" comes with real limits: 5 keywords, 20 alerts a day, and delivery that can take up to 2 hours. AI filtering exists, but it's locked behind the $49.99/month Gold plan. Here's the honest, fact-checked comparison.

What F5Bot does well

F5Bot monitors Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobsters for your keywords and emails you when they appear. Its free tier is genuinely usable for monitoring a brand name or a couple of specific phrases at low volume, and paid tiers add faster delivery, Slack/Discord integration, RSS/JSON feeds, and API access. For a lightweight, multi-platform keyword alert with no setup, it's a solid, honest tool.

The catch: free-tier limits, and AI is paywalled

The free plan caps out at 5 keywords and 20 alerts per day, with delivery that can take up to about 2 hours. It's also a literal keyword match with no understanding — it can't tell these apart:

• "Looking to replace Notion, what else is good?" (a lead)
• "I love Notion, been using it for years" (not a lead)

Both trigger a "Notion" alert on the Free and Silver ($9.99/month) tiers. AI filtering — matching by meaning instead of the literal word — only exists on Gold ($49.99/month) and above, which includes $10/month of AI token usage before extra usage is billed.

How RedditScout differs

Instead of a keyword match gated behind a paid tier, RedditScout sends each new Reddit post to an AI model that scores how well it fits your description of a good lead — on the free plan, with no keyword cap. You get a ranked shortlist, not an inbox full of raw hits to triage by hand.

Feature comparison

F5Bot pricing vs. RedditScout pricing

F5Bot's free plan covers 5 keywords and 20 alerts/day with ~2-hour delivery. Silver is $9.99/month (20 keywords, 100 alerts/day, ~5-minute delivery, still keyword-only). Gold is $49.99/month (200 keywords, 5,000 alerts/day, instant delivery, AI filtering, RSS/JSON feeds, one Slack/Discord integration). Platinum ($214.99/month) and Diamond (from $500/month) scale further for high-volume or enterprise use with more integrations and custom AI filtering. RedditScout is free to start with no credit card and no keyword cap — the trade-off is that it only covers Reddit, not Hacker News or Lobsters.

Which should you pick?

• Stick with F5Bot if you also need Hacker News or Lobsters coverage, expect high alert volume, or specifically want Slack/Discord/API delivery and don't mind paying for AI filtering.
• Try RedditScout if you're Reddit-first and want AI to pre-qualify posts against your own criteria, free, with no keyword cap.

Compare every option side by side in our Reddit monitoring tools comparison, or see the Syften comparison if real-time multi-platform alerts matter more to you than free keyword monitoring. (Looking for GummySearch? It has shut down.)

If you want this argued out at length rather than summarised, RedditScout vs F5Bot is the full head-to-head, including the cases where F5Bot is simply the right answer and you should not pay us anything. GummySearch vs F5Bot covers the same ground for anyone arriving from the shutdown, and the rest of the head-to-head comparisons include two between products we do not sell.

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