Which Reddit monitoring tool should you use now that GummySearch has shut down?
The best-known product in this category closed on 30 November 2025, citing Reddit's API policy. Here is what covers the job now, with the free-tier limits and refresh rates most comparison pages leave out.
On this page
Reddit monitoring means hearing that someone mentioned your product, your competitor or your problem space, fast enough to still act on it. Take F5Bot free if two hours is fine, Syften at $29.95 a month if your buyers are also on GitHub, Awario at $29 a month annually for a full listening suite, and Brand24 only with its refresh rate in mind: the $199 entry plan updates every 12 hours.7
Key takeaways- F5Bot's free tier is 5 keywords, 20 alerts a day and delivery within two hours, and its tiers table marks it personal use only.2
- Read the refresh rate of the tier you are buying, not the homepage. Brand24 is hourly from Team and real time from Pro at $399 a month annually; Octolens Pro is hourly.7
- Five of the eight only listen. Octolens drafts a reply for you to send, and only Reddit Pro and Bavior publish, Bavior only after you approve each one.
What happened to GummySearch, and why does it matter?
GummySearch closed on 30 November 2025. The reason it gave is the part that matters to everyone else in this list.
“the TLDR is that we're shutting down to comply with Reddit's API policies, which forbid commercial applications.”
This was not a small product failing quietly. By its own account it was relied on by “over 140,000 founders, marketers, and investors”. Its closing notice sets out the wind-down: signups closed, subscribers kept to the end of their billing period, lifetime-deal holders to 30 November 2026, free users left only an export.1
Every third-party tool here sits on the dependency GummySearch named. Price that in rather than distrusting one vendor: the only two options carrying none of it are Reddit's own product and the plain RSS feed. It is also the best question to put to a salesperson. What happens to my data if Reddit changes its terms again?
Which Reddit monitoring is genuinely free, and what is the catch?
F5Bot's free tier and Reddit Pro are genuinely free, and Reddit's own RSS feed needs no account at all. The catch differs each time: two hours of latency, an eligibility gate, and silent rate limiting.
F5Bot
Free · Silver $9.99 · Gold $49.99 · Platinum $214.99 (verified 30 Aug 2026)F5Bot emails you when a keyword appears on Reddit, Hacker News or Lobsters. The claim that it is unlimited and free is out of date: its tiers table puts the free plan at 5 keywords, 20 alerts a day, delivered within two hours and marks it personal use only.2 Silver buys five-minute delivery; Gold and above are instant.
Strong at
- Free forever, not a trial
- Covers Hacker News and Lobsters too
- Cheapest paid upgrade here, $9.99
Not for you if
- Two hours is too slow for a busy thread
- You need more than 5 keywords free
- Your use is commercial, which those terms exclude
Reddit Pro
Free (verified 30 Aug 2026)Reddit's own free business toolkit suggests communities, shows how your brand is discussed, and drafts and schedules posts from your brand account. TechCrunch covered it at launch as a free suite in beta.3 It is the only tool here that both listens and publishes while inside Reddit's terms, because it is Reddit. Access is gated, so check that your account qualifies.
Strong at
- Free, first-party, no API-policy risk
- Community suggestions plus scheduling in one place
- Posts openly as your brand
Not for you if
- Eligibility is gated and not published in detail
- You want a cross-platform view
- Brand-badged posting suits some subreddits, not all
The free option nobody sells you. Reddit's search returns an Atom feed at reddit.com/search.rss?q=<query> with no account and no tool. We checked it on 2026-08-27: HTTP 200, while /r/<subreddit>/new.rss returned 429, rate limited, on the same run.4
Yusuf, a technical cofounder, piped that per-subreddit feed into Slack rather than pay $9.99 a month. It ran for nine weeks, then began returning 429s and posted nothing for eleven days without erroring anywhere a human would look. Nobody noticed until a customer forwarded a thread the team had missed. Illustrative numbers, but that is the failure those status codes predict.
Which one covers more than Reddit without costing a fortune?
Three products here monitor the wider web, and they differ on two numbers most comparison pages skip: how often the cheap tier refreshes, and what a keyword costs.
Syften
$29.95 · $49.95 · $119.95/mo · 14-day PRO trial, no card (verified 30 Aug 2026)Syften covers where technical buyers talk: Reddit, Hacker News, Stack Exchange, GitHub, Indie Hackers, Dev.to, Product Hunt, Bluesky, Slack communities and forums. Its Reddit page targets delivery in under a minute.5 Entry at $29.95 buys 3 community filters and 100 results a day; AI filtering and the API start at $49.95.
Strong at
- Sub-minute Reddit latency at the entry price
- Trial needs no credit card
Not for you if
- You want AI filtering or the API on the cheapest plan
- You wanted a free tier to test on
- You need subreddit discovery, not keyword targeting
Awario
$29/mo annual ($49 monthly) · trial available (verified 30 Aug 2026)Awario is the cheapest real listening suite: Boolean search, white-label reports and API access appear on every plan, including the $29 Starter, which covers 3 topics and 30,000 mentions a month, with sentiment analysis on its feature list.6 It calls its monitoring real time but publishes no latency figure, so treat speed as unmeasured.
Strong at
- Boolean, white-label and API on the cheapest plan
- 30,000 mentions at $29, against 2,000 at Brand24's $199
Not for you if
- You need a published latency number
- You need TikTok or Telegram, which Brand24 names and this does not
Brand24
$199/mo annual ($249 monthly) · Pro $399 annual · 14-day trial (verified 30 Aug 2026)Brand24 names the longest source list here: X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Telegram, news, blogs, forums, podcasts, review sites and Reddit, which is on every tier.7 Read the refresh rate first: the $199 Individual plan updates every 12 hours, a twice-daily digest. Hourly starts at Team, real time at Pro, $399 a month annually.
Strong at
- Sentiment and reporting a marketing lead can present
- Reddit on every tier, not as an add-on
Not for you if
- You expected the entry plan to be real time
- Three keywords and 2,000 mentions is the whole $199 allowance
- Your use case is Reddit-only
Teodor, the marketing lead at a thirty-person software company, bought the $199 Individual plan expecting real time. Two threads comparing his product to a rival ran their course between one refresh and the next, and the 2,000-mention allowance ran out in week three of a launch. The plan did what its table says; the expectation was wrong, and it cost the quarter's two best threads.
Which one plugs into your own systems?
Octolens, and only Octolens: an API, webhooks and an MCP server on every plan, billed per mention rather than cut off at a cap.
Octolens
$159/mo annual ($199 monthly) · Scale $499 annual (verified 30 Aug 2026)Octolens covers Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, GitHub, YouTube, Bluesky, TikTok, DEV and Stack Overflow, and it is the only listening tool here that offers “a drafted reply ready for human review” rather than stopping at the alert.8 Pro is $159 a month annually for 15,000 mentions and 10 keywords, refreshed hourly, with overage from about a cent. Real time starts at Scale.
Strong at
- API, webhooks and MCP server on every plan
- Drafts a reply, not just a flag
- Per-mention billing rather than a hard cap
Not for you if
- You want real time at the entry tier
- Per-mention overage makes the bill hard to predict
- You wanted it to publish, and it hands the draft back
Which one actually does something about the thread?
Two, and Reddit Pro is one of them. Bavior is the other, and it sits at the paid end because the expensive part of this job was never the alert. It is the forty minutes of writing a comment a subreddit will keep. If your team reads Reddit and only misses threads, a $10 alert tool is the right buy and this is not.
Bavior
$99/mo billed monthly · $79.17/mo billed annually (verified 30 Aug 2026)Bavior monitors subreddits, scores each thread for buying intent and shows the quote that qualified it, drafts a reply in your voice, and posts it on an account you control only after you approve it. Subreddit rules are read before anything goes out, and every action leaves a record. See brand monitoring, keyword monitoring and the approval gate.
Strong at
- Turns a found thread into a posted reply
- Rules read before posting, on accounts you own
- A record of what went out, where, and why
Not for you if
- You need X, LinkedIn, TikTok or review sites
- You want a monitor-only tier, or a free one
- Your team answers threads already and only misses them
Lena, a solo founder, made clearing the approval queue the first thing she did each morning. Over a quarter that turned roughly one qualified thread a day into replies that went out, because the drafting was done and the decision took two minutes. Illustrative, not a customer result, and it depends on somebody clearing the queue. When nobody does, an approval queue is only a slower inbox.
Bavior watches Reddit. It does not monitor X, LinkedIn, TikTok, news or review sites, so it does not replace Brand24 or Awario for brand-wide listening. There is no free tier, only a trial and some free tools. Managed posting from accounts we run is priced separately from every plan, so the sticker price is not the whole bill.
How do the eight compare on the numbers that matter?
Latency and price do not move together, so read the latency column first: two of the cheapest options are slower than they sound.
| Tool | Sources | Alert latency | Drafts | Publishes | Entry price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| F5Bot | Reddit, HN, Lobsters | Free: 2h · Silver: 5 min · Gold+: instant | No | No | Free · $9.99 |
| Reddit Pro | Reddit only | Not published | Yes | Yes | Free |
| Reddit search RSS | Reddit only | Near-realtime until rate-limited | No | No | Free |
| Syften | 15+ dev communities | Reddit under 1 min | No | No | $29.95/mo |
| Awario | 10 source types incl. web | Not published | No | No | $29/mo annual |
| Brand24 | 15+ named platforms | Entry: every 12h · Pro: realtime | No | No | $199/mo annual |
| Octolens | 15+ incl. GitHub, Stack Overflow | Pro: hourly · Scale: realtime | Yes | No | $159/mo annual |
| Bavior | Reddit only | Not published | Yes | Yes, after you approve | $99/mo monthly · $79.17 annual |
What should you ask any Reddit tool vendor before you pay?
Four questions, and none of them is about features.
What happens if Reddit changes its API terms?
The most-used tool in this category shut down over exactly this, in writing. Ask where your saved searches, history and exports live, and what notice you would get.
What is the refresh rate on the plan I am buying?
Not the top plan. Brand24's entry tier refreshes every 12 hours, Octolens Pro hourly, F5Bot free every two hours. “Realtime” on a homepage usually describes a tier you are not buying.
What counts as one mention, and what happens at the cap?
Brand24 caps at 2,000 mentions on the entry plan; Octolens bills overage per mention. One stops mid-month, the other sends a bigger invoice.
Is my use commercial, and does the free tier allow it?
F5Bot's free tier is marked personal use only, so a company's brand monitoring sits outside those terms. Worth knowing before you build a workflow on it.
So which one should you actually buy?
Match the tool to where your Reddit effort dies. Three of these six answers cost nothing or almost nothing.
You just need to know when your name comes up
F5Bot free, then $9.99 a month for Silver the day two hours is too slow.
Your buyers are on GitHub and Stack Overflow too
Syften at $29.95/mo: the widest developer-community coverage here, Reddit alerts under a minute.
You need sentiment and a cross-channel report
Awario at $29/mo annual, or Brand24 to present to a client, budgeting the $399 Pro tier for real time.
You want it inside your own systems
Octolens at $159/mo annual: an API, an MCP server, and a drafted reply waiting.
The threads get found and never answered
Bavior, from $99/mo. It writes the reply and posts it on your own account after you approve it.
You want to spend nothing at all
Reddit Pro if your account qualifies, plus reddit.com/search.rss in a feed reader, until it is silently rate-limited.
- GummySearch closing notice and wind-down terms: gummysearch.com/closing-time
- F5Bot tiers table and FAQ: f5bot.com/tiers, f5bot.com/faq
- Reddit Pro product page, reddit.com/pro, plus launch coverage: TechCrunch, 8 March 2024
- Live check of reddit.com/search.rss and
/r/<sub>/new.rss, run 2026-08-27: HTTP 200 and HTTP 429 respectively - Syften homepage, documentation and Reddit page: syften.com, syften.com/documentation, syften.com/reddit
- Awario homepage and features: awario.com, awario.com/features
- Brand24 source list, prices, mention caps and update frequencies: brand24.com
- Octolens homepage and plan table: octolens.com
- Bavior pricing and approval model: bavior.com/#pricing, approval and account safety
Frequently asked questions.
Is F5Bot still free in 2026?
Yes, but the free tier is smaller than its reputation. As of 30 August 2026 it covers 5 keywords, 20 alerts a day, delivered within two hours, and it is marked personal use only. Paid tiers exist mainly to buy speed: Silver at $9.99 a month drops the delay to five minutes, and Gold at $49.99 and above deliver instantly or on a schedule. If you have been told F5Bot is unlimited and free, that description is out of date.
What is the best free alternative to GummySearch?
There is no single clean replacement, because GummySearch's strongest job was audience discovery: clustering subreddits into audiences and mining them for demand signals. Almost nothing free does that specific thing. For keyword alerts, F5Bot's free tier is the closest free match. For finding the right communities, Reddit Pro's community suggestions are free if your account qualifies, and reading a shortlist of candidate subreddits yourself costs nothing but time. For everything else GummySearch did, expect to pay.
Is Brand24 realtime?
Not on the plan most people buy. As of 30 August 2026 the $199-a-month Individual tier refreshes every 12 hours, which makes it a twice-daily digest. Hourly refresh starts on the Team tier and realtime starts on Pro at $399 a month on annual billing. This is the single most common mistake in Brand24 comparisons, and it matters on Reddit specifically, where a thread is often decided within a few hours.
Can I just use Reddit's RSS feed instead of paying for a tool?
You can, until it stops. Reddit's search endpoint returns an Atom feed at reddit.com/search.rss with no account required, and it returned HTTP 200 when we checked it on 27 August 2026. On the same run, the per-subreddit feed at /r/<subreddit>/new.rss returned HTTP 429, rate limited. That is the honest trade: a free feed that works most of the time and fails without telling you, versus a paid tool that owns the retry logic. For a side project the feed is fine; for anything you would be embarrassed to miss, it is not.
Do any of these tools reply to Reddit threads for me?
Almost none. F5Bot, Syften, Brand24, Awario and the RSS feed surface a thread and stop there. Octolens goes one step further and drafts a reply for a human to review, but you still post it yourself. Only two options here put words on Reddit: Reddit Pro, which drafts and schedules from your own brand account, and Bavior, which posts on accounts you control after you approve each action. Decide which side of that line your bottleneck sits on before you compare prices.
Which tool finds the right subreddits for me?
Very few of the paid listening tools do this at all. Syften does keyword targeting rather than audience mapping, and Brand24, Awario, Octolens and F5Bot all expect you to already know where to look. Reddit Pro suggests communities natively, and this is the job GummySearch was best at before it closed. Bavior's subreddit finder and website subreddit finder do the same job inside an account, which starts on a free trial; the cheapest way to answer the question first is to read the candidate subreddits yourself.
The team that researches and maintains Bavior’s writing on Reddit marketing and AI search visibility. Every figure here is attributed to a named source with the date it was checked, and none of our links are affiliate links.
Found a number that looks wrong? Tell us and we will re-check it: support@bavior.com