The API landscape
Seven products in the social listening category expose an API. They differ on price, auth, and what the API actually returns. Some offer a full search endpoint. Others return aggregate analytics with no access to individual mentions. Two gate the API behind their most expensive tier.
| Tool | API auth | API price | What it returns | Webhooks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Octolens | Bearer token | Included on Pro ($199/mo) and Scale ($599/mo) | Mentions, analytics, keyword CRUD, usage | Yes |
| SnitchFeed | Bearer token | Included on all plans (from $47/mo) | Mentions, alerts, keyword management | Yes |
| Syften | API key | Included on all plans (from $29.95/mo) | Mentions, filters, delivery config | Yes |
| Brand24 | Bearer token | $99–$149/mo add-on, Business ($399/mo) and above only | Aggregate analytics, 31-day window | Not checked |
| Mention | OAuth 2.0 | Included (plan ~$599/mo, sales-led) | Mentions, alerts, analytics | Not checked |
| Awario | Not documented | Enterprise only (price not published) | Not checked | Not checked |
| F5Bot | Bearer token | Platinum tier ($214.99/mo) | Alerts, keyword CRUD | Yes, immediate |
discatch plans a REST API where every endpoint accepts dry_run: true and returns a quote before anything runs. Auth is a bearer token scoped to read, search, catches:write, or billing:read. The base URL is https://api.discatch.com. Prices are per unit, not per seat.
The MCP landscape
Four products have an MCP server. Only one is on the official MCP registry. None of them push new mentions to the agent.
| Tool | MCP auth | Tools | Tier-gated | On official registry | Push |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Octolens | OAuth | 23 | No, every plan | Yes (com.octolens/octolens, published 2026-07-31) | No |
| SnitchFeed | OAuth | 24 (stated; varies by page) | No, every plan | No | No |
| Syften | API key | 8 | Yes, PRO only ($119.95/mo) | No | No |
| Brand24 | Not documented | Not checked | Not checked (help-center only) | No | No |
What the official MCP registry shows
The official MCP registry at registry.modelcontextprotocol.io is backed by Anthropic, GitHub, PulseMCP, and Microsoft. It launched in preview in September 2025 and is still marked as preview on 2026-09-10. Searches for "social listening" and "brand monitoring" return zero servers. Only Octolens appears, as com.octolens/octolens with a remote streamable-http endpoint. SnitchFeed, Syften, and Brand24 are absent.
PulseMCP, which indexes over 21,000 servers, has paused its submit form and recommends publishing to the official registry. Smithery, Glama, mcp.so, and the awesome-mcp-servers lists show no social listening vendor. The category is early.
What "API" means in this category
Not all social listening APIs are equal. Some return individual mentions with full metadata. Others return aggregate counts and sentiment scores over a time window. The difference matters for an agent that wants to read a specific mention and decide what to do.
Octolens, SnitchFeed, and Syften return individual mentions. An agent can read the text, the author, the thread context, and the source URL. Brand24’s API returns aggregate analytics over a 31-day window: mention counts, sentiment distribution, and reach estimates. An agent using Brand24’s API cannot fetch a specific Reddit comment to decide whether to draft a reply.
F5Bot’s API is alert-focused: get alerts, create/update/delete keywords. The webhooks fire immediately when a keyword matches on Reddit, Hacker News, or Lobste.rs. This is the simplest and most direct API in the set, but it covers only three sources. Mention’s API at dev.mention.com covers alerts, mentions, and analytics with OAuth 2.0, but the product requires a sales call to access.
Auth patterns
Octolens and SnitchFeed use OAuth for MCP and bearer tokens for REST. Syften uses an API key for both. Brand24’s MCP auth is not documented on the main site. F5Bot uses a bearer token from its dashboard. Mention uses OAuth 2.0 for its REST API.
For an agent, OAuth is the better path. It avoids pasting keys into config files and lets the agent authenticate through a browser redirect. The MCP spec favors OAuth 2.1 with PKCE. discatch plans OAuth 2.1 for MCP and scoped bearer tokens for REST.
Machine-readable discovery
An agent finds tools by reading llms.txt, .well-known/mcp.json, and openapi.json. Octolens publishes all three. SnitchFeed publishes llms.txt and llms-full.txt but not openapi.json or .well-known/mcp.json. Syften publishes llms.txt only. Brand24 publishes llms.txt (loosely formatted) and an agent-addressed pricing.md. Mention, Awario, and F5Bot publish none of these files.
| Tool | llms.txt | llms-full.txt | openapi.json | .well-known/mcp.json |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Octolens | Yes | Yes | Yes (52 paths) | Yes |
| SnitchFeed | Yes (prose format) | Yes | No | No |
| Syften | Yes | No | No | No |
| Brand24 | Yes (loosely formatted) | No | Not checked | No |
| Mention | No | No | No | No |
| Awario | No | No | No | No |
| F5Bot | No | No | No | No |
Pricing for API access
The cheapest API access is Syften at $29.95/mo. SnitchFeed starts at $47/mo (or $59/mo, depending on which surface you read). Octolens Pro is $199/mo monthly or $159/mo annual. Brand24 requires the Business plan at $399/mo plus a $99–$149/mo API add-on. Mention requires a sales call for a single plan at roughly $599/mo. Awario requires Enterprise at an unpublished price. F5Bot requires the Platinum tier at $214.99/mo.
The pattern is clear: most tools treat the API as a premium feature. Two (Syften and SnitchFeed) include it on every plan. Three (Brand24, Awario, Mention) gate it behind their most expensive tier. One (F5Bot) puts it at $214.99/mo. Only discatch plans per-unit pricing where a single search costs a fraction of a cent.
discatch plans per-unit pricing. A search is $0.002, a result is $0.0005, and an alert is $0.001. These are placeholders. The Starter plan is $19/mo and includes a unit bundle. An agent running a handful of queries a day spends a fraction of what a seat costs. The quote before every call means an agent can reason about cost before acting.
The per-seat problem for agents
Per-seat pricing was designed for humans. One person needs one seat. An agent that runs ten queries a day does not need a $199/mo seat. It needs a per-call price it can evaluate and a budget it can track. Per-unit pricing lets an agent compare cost across tools the same way it compares latency or coverage.
Octolens’s /agents page offers 50 free searches with no card, which is the closest any seat-based tool comes to per-call pricing. But 50 searches is not monitoring. A catch that fires three times a day for 30 days is 90 alerts. On discatch, that is 90 alert units at $0.001 each. On Octolens, it is a Pro seat at $199/mo.
What each MCP server can do
Octolens has the widest MCP surface with 23 tools covering mention listing, analytics, keyword and feed CRUD, and usage queries. The server is at app.octolens.com/api/mcp/v2 using streamable-http. Its .well-known/mcp.json declares all 23 tools. The /agents page offers 50 free searches with no card required, though this is not a monitoring tier.
SnitchFeed’s MCP server uses OAuth on every plan. The stated tool count varies: 24 on the MCP feature page, 42 on another page, 39 on a third. The server covers per-platform monitoring for Reddit, LinkedIn, Hacker News, and X. Per-framework integration pages show how to connect from Hermes Agent and OpenClaw.
Syften’s MCP server has 8 tools: get_monitoring_config, get_delivery_config, get_filter_health, get_filter_syntax, preview_filter, get_matches, set_filters, and set_match_seen. It is PRO-only at $119.95/mo and uses API-key auth. The MCP page says "we monitor; your agent analyzes" and has explicit safety boundaries: the agent cannot change billing or post on the user’s behalf. Config snippets are provided for Claude Code, Codex, VS Code, and Cursor.
Brand24’s MCP server is at mcp.brand24.com. It is documented only in a help-center article at help.brand24.com, not on the main site. Auth, tools, and plan gating are not confirmed from the main domain.
How the API shapes differ
Octolens returns individual mentions with metadata across 15+ platforms. Its API covers everything from search to keyword CRUD to analytics. Brand24’s API is aggregate-first: it returns mention counts and sentiment over a 31-day window, not individual mentions at will. This makes Brand24’s API useful for dashboards but limited for an agent that wants to read and act on a specific mention.
Syften’s API exposes filters, delivery config, and matches. F5Bot’s API is the simplest: get alerts, create/update/delete alerts, with webhooks that fire immediately on match. Mention’s API at dev.mention.com covers alerts, mentions, and analytics with OAuth 2.0.
discatch’s API is designed around the quote. Every endpoint accepts dry_run: true and returns the price before anything runs. The result schema is the same for search, capture, and catch deliveries: source, URL, excerpt, prescore, thread context, and optional classification. Catches are standing queries with destinations, not just filters.
What discatch adds
- Per-unit pricing with a quote before every call.
- Push destinations that wake an agent when a catch fires. No polling.
- A waterfall that tries providers in order of cost and accuracy. The caller never sees which provider served a result.
- An MCP server with OAuth (planned for roadmap phase 3).
- llms.txt, openapi.json, and .well-known/mcp.json (planned).