Reddit Keyword Alerts: Free and Paid Ways to Know When You're Mentioned

F5Bot's free plan is the simplest free Reddit keyword alert. It emails you within 2 hours when one of 5 keywords shows up in a new post or comment, for personal use only (as of Nov 3, 2026)¹². For a business, KWatch.io's free plan covers 2 Reddit keywords and its paid alerts start at $19 a month³, and the old free workaround, Reddit's RSS search feed, stops working on November 13, 2026⁴.

We tested the free methods that need no account on Nov 3, 2026 and read every other plan on its vendor's site the same day. SlopMog, which wrote this, isn't an alert tool. It finds threads and drafts the reply, so it only turns up in the last section.

Whichever alert you pick, what you post in the thread decides whether it stays up, and that's the subject of how to market on Reddit without getting banned.

Free Reddit keyword alerts, tested

These seven free methods split on two questions: do they see comments, and will they still work after November 13? Reddit's feeds and Google Alerts need no account, so we ran those ourselves. The rest we read on their own pages.

F5Bot and KWatch.io: free, with fine print

F5Bot watches Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters, and says it tracks "posts and comments in every subreddit"². The free plan covers 5 keywords, 20 alerts a day (10 per keyword) and a delay of up to 2 hours, and it's "personal use only"¹. The $12.99 Silver plan is personal and non-commercial too. F5Bot's own line on it: "If you are monitoring for a business, a client, or something you sell, Gold is built for that." Gold is $49.99 a month.

KWatch.io's free plan watches 2 Reddit keywords and 2 on Hacker News, without filters, and alerts arrive "within a couple of seconds and up to 1 minute"³. Its pricing page attaches no personal-use clause, so it's the free option for a business that only needs its own name and one competitor's.

Google Alerts: only what Google has indexed

Google Alerts can't send you a page Google hasn't indexed. We typed site:reddit.com mattress into Google Alerts on the evening of Nov 3, 2026, and its preview said "There are no recent results for your search query."⁶. Reddit's own feed for r/Mattress listed 25 new posts from the previous 24 hours⁹. The same words without site:reddit.com brought up recent news, so the preview itself was working.

A saved alert may still pick up some threads days later, so treat it as a backup that costs nothing, not as the way you hear about a new thread.

IFTTT and Zapier: posts only

Both have a Reddit trigger for new posts that match a search, and neither watches other people's comments. IFTTT's free plan checks hourly and picks up at most 20 posts per check¹⁰. Zapier's "New Post Matching Search" trigger does the same job¹¹, and its free plan checks every 15 minutes, runs 100 tasks a month and allows two-step Zaps¹², which is enough to send each match to Slack or email.

Reddit Pro: keywords, no alerts

Reddit Pro is Reddit's free tool for businesses. Its Trends page lets you "monitor keywords to see where, when, and how they're being discussed on Reddit", posts and comments included, with no limit on how many⁵. Reddit's help page for Trends doesn't mention alerts or notifications, so you open the dashboard yourself. It counts public, SFW, English conversations only.

Reddit's RSS feeds stop on November 13

Reddit's feeds were the classic free alert: paste reddit.com/search.rss?q=yourbrand&sort=new into a feed reader, or pipe it into Slack. On Sep 30, 2026, Reddit announced in r/modnews that it will "stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026", adding: "If you use RSS for feeds outside of a community you moderate, there is no replacement."⁴

The search feed still answered when we tested it on Nov 3: 25 entries for "f5bot", 22 posts and 3 subreddits, the newest from Oct 28, 2026, and no comments⁸. If any of your alerts run on a Reddit feed (in a feed reader, an RSS-to-Slack app, or a Zapier or IFTTT recipe that starts from an RSS URL), move them before November 13.

The feeds are one part of a wider change. Reddit switched off logged-out access to its .json pages after a May 28, 2026 announcement¹³ (our logged-out request got a 403), stopped taking new public API access requests on Oct 31, and says "Public access will close for all remaining apps and users" in March 2027¹⁴. Alerts for Reddit, an Android app for keyword and subreddit alerts, has told its users it "will be forced to shut down in March 2027"¹⁵. Before you pay a year up front for any alert tool, ask how it will read Reddit after March 2027.

Paid Reddit alert tools compared

Paying buys three things the free options don't have: more keywords, Slack, and permission to use them for a business. The prices below were read on each vendor's site on Nov 3, 2026. If you're here because GummySearch closed, here's what took over each of its jobs.

Which one fits depends on what you need on top of the alert:

• The most Reddit keywords for the least money: KWatch.io Essential, 20 of them for $19 a month³.
• Slack for about $50 a month: Syften Standard⁷ or F5Bot Gold¹. Here's how Syften's alerts compare with SlopMog.
• One feed for a team or an AI agent: Octolens watches Reddit, X, LinkedIn, YouTube and 11 more sources, with an API, webhooks and MCP on every plan¹⁶. See Octolens next to SlopMog.
• Sentiment, reports, and news, blogs and social media alongside Reddit: Brand24¹⁸ or Awario²⁰. We put Brand24's plans and Awario's side by side with SlopMog.

For tools that also draft or post the reply, see Reddit marketing tools sorted by the job you need done.

Keywords that don't flood your inbox

Every alert plan rations something. F5Bot's free plan stops at 20 alerts a day and 10 per keyword¹, KWatch.io's watches 2 Reddit keywords³, and Syften's Entry plan delivers 100 community results a day⁷. r/Mattress alone had 25 new posts in the 24 hours before our test⁹, so a bare "mattress" would use up F5Bot's free allowance on one subreddit.

Start with the words only you are called: the brand, product names, and the misspelling people type. Add competitors only next to buying words such as "vs", "alternative" or "review", or every delivery complaint about them lands in your inbox too. Problem phrases work best in quotes and limited to the subreddits where buyers ask. A SaaS called TaskPilot shouldn't watch "pilot".

Test a keyword before it goes on the list: search it on Reddit, sort by New, and read the last week. If most results aren't about you, narrow it or drop it. Filters handle the rest. F5Bot can limit a keyword to certain subreddits, exclude terms and require two keywords together², Syften adds AI filtering on its $49.95 Standard plan⁷, and Octolens rates every mention high, medium or low for relevance¹⁶.

What to do when an alert lands

An alert tells you a thread exists. After it come five jobs: read the thread, check the subreddit's rules, write an answer that helps the person asking, post it, and check later that it's still up.

The writing decides whether the comment stays up. How to mention your product in a comment that stays up covers which threads to pick, what to say and when to link, and the Reddit marketing guide shows where each subreddit keeps its rules.

Paste a thread into the free comment generator

SlopMog replaces the alert with a queue. It reads your site for keyword groups, finds Reddit and YouTube threads every day, and puts the best in your queue with a comment drafted in the thread's tone. You edit, approve or skip each draft, or switch a site to hands-free, and health checks show which posted comments are still live.

Step 1 · Finding threads

Test the Waters is $99 a month for 1,000 credits, and a regular comment is 6 credits ($0.60), so the plan covers about 166 comments. SlopMog searches daily, not within the minute, covers Reddit and YouTube only, and has no free trial, just a 7-day refund on your first payment. See what each plan covers.