first set, phase 1b
Stories and comments on Hacker News, read through the official API, free, with free alerts on the free tier.
Register a catch with hackernews as the source. discatch reads every story and comment through the official search API, free, and pushes new matches to your agent or webhook. The free tier includes Hacker News alerts at one hour or slower at no cost. Comments deep in a thread, which email-only tools miss, are results with parent_url pointing at the story.
Every story and comment. Title hits, comment mentions, Ask HN and Show HN threads, with thread score and reply counts on each result.
The official search API, free, no waterfall needed. Time filters map straight through, and every result is re-filtered locally against your full boolean query.
One syntax for every source: quotes, AND, OR, NOT, site:, author:, lang:.
query
"your product" OR "yourdomain.com"One result, as a catch delivers it: source, author, the post, a prescore, thread context, and a suggested action your agent can act on.
We built a tool that monitors Reddit, HN, and GitHub for mentions of your project. Free for open-source maintainers. Looking for feedback on the alert format.
F5Bot sends free email alerts for Reddit, HN, and Lobste.rs. Its API and webhooks start at $214.99 a month. discatch’s free tier matches F5Bot’s free case for HN: alerts at one hour or slower, no credit card. The paid tiers add push to an agent, tighter intervals, and the API.
Hacker News’s point system is the strongest engagement signal for this source. A story with 87 points and 41 comments is a hot thread. A story with 2 points and 0 comments is noise. The prescore weights HN scores logarithmically so a 200-point thread scores only slightly higher than a 50-point thread. This prevents front-page stories from drowning everything else.
Hacker News is the one community that discusses social listening tools unprompted. F5Bot has been mentioned 23 times on HN since 2025, more than any other product in this category. Two HN threads from 2019 asking for keyword alerts still rank in the top five results. A deprecated scraper actor holds position one. The gap is clear: people want HN alerts, and the tools that exist today are either email-only, deprecated, or buried behind dashboards.
Syften, Octolens, SnitchFeed, ParseStream, and Noisely each have a Hacker News tool page, but none push to an agent, none offer a free tier, and none give you a quote before the call runs.
Your product or domain
"your product" OR "yourdomain.com"Category conversations
"social listening" OR "brand monitoring" OR "keyword alerts"Competitor mentions
"octolens" OR "syften" OR "f5bot"The free tier includes Hacker News catches at one hour or slower at no cost. No credit card. This is the on-ramp: sign up, set a catch on your product name, and get a webhook or email when someone mentions you on HN. Tighter intervals use paid units.
Hacker News is the one community where developers discuss social listening tools unprompted. F5Bot has been mentioned 23 times since 2025, more than any other product in this category. When someone posts a Show HN, the comments are a focus group. When someone asks "what do you use for X," the replies are a competitive landscape drawn by the people who actually buy these tools.
Comment mentions are the high-value signal. A mention in a story title is visible. A mention in comment 47 of a thread with 200 replies is invisible unless you have a catch on it. Email-only tools like F5Bot deliver story matches but miss deep comments. discatch delivers both, with parent_url on every comment result so you know which thread it belongs to.
The official search API indexes every story and comment. It supports query terms, tag filters (Show HN, Ask HN, stories, comments), and numeric filters for score and date. discatch maps your boolean query to the API, fetches results, and re-filters locally against the full query so weaker native search still returns correct results. Time filters like since:7d map to the API’s numericFilters. The API is free and rate-limited; discatch stays within the limits.
Not yet. Hacker News is in the first set of sources, phase 1b of the roadmap, and discatch is pre-launch. The API serves the doctor manifest today, and the manifest’s sources_now list is the truth for what is live. When phase 1b ships, catches on this source read Hacker News through the official search API with no provider in the middle.
On the free tier, catches on Hacker News at one hour or slower cost nothing. Tighter intervals use paid units.
Both. A mention in a comment is a result with parent_url pointing at the story.
One search unit per call, plus one result unit per matched item. The quote tells you the ceiling. Free-source searches cost less than waterfall searches.
The official search API supports tag filters. Use them alongside your query to narrow to Show HN, Ask HN, or stories only.
As fast as the official search API indexes a post. For catches, the interval you set determines how often discatch checks. The free tier runs at one hour or slower.
Not yet. F5Bot covers Lobste.rs alongside Reddit and HN. discatch does not have Lobste.rs as a source in phase 1.
F5Bot sends free email alerts for Reddit, HN, and Lobste.rs. discatch sends free HN alerts too, and adds push to your agent, an API, and an MCP server. F5Bot’s API and webhooks start at $214.99 a month.
Syften, Octolens, SnitchFeed, ParseStream, and Noisely each have a Hacker News tool page. F5Bot has a 638-word guide. Two HN threads from 2019 and a deprecated scraper actor still rank above most of them.
Yes. Set the catch destination to a webhook. discatch signs the payload with HMAC-SHA256 so your handler can verify it.
Last reviewed by Parsa Khazaeepoul, founder, dcouple. Facts from docs/data-sources.md and docs/coverage-matrix.md; status from docs/api.md; the search landscape from docs/seo/keyword-map.md.