:D

We’re hooking up to the APIs - the goal is to alert you of mentions as quickly as possible, so waiting for Google to index results would introduce (much) too much lag.

Interesting feature request! I’ll have a think on it.

Thanks! I haven't used Pulsar, but the general answer is that mentions.us is focussed on sending you alerts for notifications, whereas more sophisticated social listening tools provide a lot more analytics (e.g., sentiment analysis).

If your company just wants alerts when their keywords are mentioned on social media then mentions.us should work great for them. If you work for Coca Cola then you likely need something very different from your social listening tool!

Hey Julien! I’ve seen you advertising KWatch in lots of places, assume you’re connected to it / know the founder?

For LinkedIn monitoring we use the voyager APIs. It’s not perfect because it gets posts but not comments, but it’s pretty good.

I put more details in a reply to another comment, but basically I think the number of people willing to pay for email alerts is small, so I’ve made the service free for them. It’s only teams who want Slack notifications who have paid plans.

I’m not optimising to extract every possible $ from the market with that pricing strategy. Instead I hope it will maximise the number of users whilst breaking even on costs.

Thanks for the feedback! For saved terms we show you the number of matches we’ve notified you about, which always starts at zero, whereas during creating we show you how many you would have matched. That’s a confusing UI and I should improve it

I think most of the people who sign up for email alerts would never pay. Lots of them are indie hackers or folks with a side project - I've been there, and know how price sensitive those communities are. I'd rather they use the service for free than not at all - I get valuable feedback from that, a marketing boost if they tell others about it, and the validation of having built something other people use.

I do have a paid plan for people who want Slack notifications, and I think those folks ought to be happy to pay. My hope is that I'll eventually get a few paid signups and that those will cover the costs of the service (which are minimal).

I know I lose a bit of revenue with the above approach, but it's a tradeoff I'm happy to make.

Through the API - in particular the info endpoint[1], combined with the fact that Reddit IDs are base36 encoded sequentially increasing integers[2]. You can get 100 objects at a time, so if you make ~3 requests a second it's enough to get all of the new posts and comments.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/#GET_api_info

[2] https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/#fullnames

For now we use the LinkedIn voyager API's search endpoint