F5Bot is a free service that emails you when your keywords appear on Reddit or Hacker News. It does one thing and does it well. LeadsRadar adds the three things you'd ask F5Bot for if you could: semantic relevance, reply drafts, and a triage UI.
F5Bot is the OG free keyword alerter for Reddit and Hacker News. Set keywords, get email digests when matches appear. Reliable, ugly, no AI.
| F5Bot | LeadsRadar | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $19/mo |
| Reddit + Hacker News | ||
| Keyword matching | yes (exact) | yes (+ semantic) |
| Catches threads without exact keywords | yes (embeddings) | |
| Relevance score per lead | 0–100 | |
| AI-drafted replies | 5 per lead | |
| Triage UI | no (email digest) | Blitz mode |
| Cross-session dedup |
Hobbyists and bootstrapped founders who want to monitor a small number of high-signal keywords for free, are happy to read every match, and write every reply from scratch.
Founders who tried F5Bot, got buried in alerts, and want a system that filters for high-intent threads and helps draft the actual replies — for less than $20/month.
If you act on more than 5 leads per month, yes. F5Bot emails you matches; you still have to open each one, decide if it's a real lead, and write a reply from scratch. LeadsRadar does the filtering, scoring, and drafting — typically saves 1–2 hours per scan.
Yes. Some users use F5Bot for raw keyword alerts and LeadsRadar for the deeper twice-a-week scans where they want relevance scoring and reply drafts. They solve adjacent problems.
No catch — it's a hobby project run by a single developer with sponsor support. The tradeoff is feature scope: keyword matching only, no AI, no UI beyond email. For many use cases that's perfect; for serious outreach it's a starting point.
20 leads free, no card. Less than the price of one Sprout Social seat — for the part you actually use.
Try 20 leads free