lurk

lurk is a free, open-source monitoring tool that watches Reddit and X for people asking for a product like yours, scores each post and comment with a one-line reason, and delivers new leads to wherever you work. It is built for founders, marketers and sales teams who want to find customers in public conversations, get cited by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and rank on Google. The product combines lead monitoring, Reddit SEO, competitor tracking and pain-point analysis in a single dashboard, and it never posts or sends DMs on your behalf. Most social monitoring tools stop at keyword matching. A keyword alert fires every time a phrase appears, which means you get a flood of matches you have to read yourself, no sense of whether the person is actually shopping, and no idea whether the community you would reply in even allows promotion. lurk states the difference directly: unlike a keyword alert, lurk reads the whole post and the community rules before it calls something a lead. That matters because the valuable moments on Reddit and X are specific - someone asking for an alternative to a tool you sell, someone whose licence just ran out, or someone who built their own version because nothing on the market fit. Those are the conversations where a careful, useful reply can win a customer. The core of lurk is lead monitoring. Every post and comment it finds is scored, and each one carries a written reason plus the exact phrase that matched. For each lead you can see who asked, why it matched and what the community allows, so you decide whether to join the conversation. Leads are grouped by intent: asking for what you sell, meaning someone wants a tool like yours and says what it has to do; leaving a competitor, where a licence ran out or the price went up and they are asking what to use instead; and building their own, where they built or vibe coded their own solution and big posts are ranked by reach, so a reply gets seen. lurk also keeps conversations together. One thread can contain more than one person asking, and lurk saves that conversation, marking each participant as a post, comment, comparing or solution-seeking, so you can see the whole opportunity at once. Reddit SEO is the second major surface. lurk finds the threads Google already ranks for your keywords and filters them down to the Reddit discussions that get search traffic, so a single reply keeps working long after it is posted. Each ranked thread shows its Google position, when it was posted, and how many comments it has, saved at the time it was observed so you can see which threads are still alive. lurk also flags when a competitor is named in a thread, because a thread that already compares tools is where a careful answer is welcome. In the example shown in the product, keywords such as "free form builder" and "typeform alternatives" surface r/Entrepreneur and r/marketing threads sitting at positions #1, #2, #4 and #5. Competitor tracking shows who gets recommended in the threads your leads sit in, over the last 30 days, and how each mention was meant. In the sample data, Jotform, Typeform and Google Forms each appear seven times, giving 21 mentions read with one negative. Because lurk reads the surrounding text, it can label a mention as positive, negative or simply named in a comparison. Alongside mention counts, lurk surfaces pain themes that keep coming up across your saved leads, such as "Simpler Alternative To Jotform" or "Repetitive Training Feedback Forms", so you can see which complaints are recurring rather than treating every lead as an isolated event. A distinguishing part of the workflow is that lurk puts the community's promotion policy next to the lead. Each community's rules are read from its sidebar and shown with the post, so before you reply you can see what that subreddit expects. In the example, r/nocode states "No blatant self-promotion without giving value back" and "No blatant self-promotion; contribute value". lurk's own promise is that it never posts or DMs: it is a listening and reading tool, and the decision to join a conversation stays with you. Leads arrive as a digest. New leads are sent to Slack, Discord, email or a webhook, each with the score, the reason and a link. Under the hosted free plan, scans run daily at the hour you pick, SEO data refreshes every seven days, and you get daily alerts to Slack and Discord plus one custom webhook. Saved examples are kept for 30 days and can be filtered by community. Each project supports up to 25 keywords and 10 communities, and there is an allowance of 1,000 API reads per day. You can start on a house wallet within the hosted free limits. lurk is open source under the MIT licence, and it is designed to run on your own key with your own model. Self-hosting takes one command: Docker starts the app and Postgres together, and the scoring instructions are a file in src/lib/prompts.ts rather than a hidden secret, so you can read and change exactly how leads are judged. There is a read-only API and an MCP server so your own tools and agents can read projects, leads and SEO rows; there is deliberately no tool for posting or sending a DM. An API schema is published at /openapi.json and an agent guide at /agent-guide.md. The data layer is powered by AnyAPI, which provides one key for every platform - Reddit, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube among them - with no scraper to run, no proxies to rent and no developer account on each site. Pricing is simple: lurk itself is free. The comparison table in the product shows F5Bot as another free option that only emails keyword matches, with no dashboard, no AI scoring, no competitor tracking and no SEO, while ReplyGuy starts at $10 per month, LeadsRover at $13.99 per month and GummySearch at $29 per month on their entry plans with monthly billing. Self-hosting is free as well, and the hosted plan asks for no card. AnyAPI, the data provider behind lurk, is pay per request with no subscription and failed calls costing nothing; example prices run from $0.38 per 1,000 requests for reddit.search, $0.70 for tiktok.video_comments, $1.00 for amazon.product, $1.20 for instagram.profile, $3.50 for maps.reviews and $4.00 for linkedin.profile. New users get about 150 requests on the house, no card required. Concrete scenarios from the product: a founder selling a scheduling tool watches X for people asking for a Calendly alternative with round-robin scheduling and finds both buyers and the moment a competitor's customer starts building their own. A no-code form tool watches r/nocode for people looking for a simpler Jotform alternative, and sees two people in the same thread asking for the same thing. A marketer searches "typeform alternatives" and finds the exact Reddit threads ranking on Google, writes one reply and keeps collecting traffic. Someone working on AI visibility watches the terms that appear in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. A self-hoster runs lurk on their own infrastructure with their own model. lurk is aimed at founders and small go-to-market teams who sell software and need to find buyers in public conversations: sales and marketing people doing outbound by hand, growth marketers pursuing Reddit SEO, and developers who want an open-source alternative they can audit and self-host. Because the API and MCP are read-only, it also fits teams who want their own agents and tools to query lead and SEO data without any risk of the tool posting or messaging on their behalf. lurk turns the noise of Reddit and X into a short, reasoned list of people who are actually asking for what you sell, shows you who else is getting recommended in those threads, and points at the Reddit discussions that already rank on Google so one good reply keeps paying off. It is free, MIT-licensed, self-hostable in one command, and it never posts or DMs - it just helps you find the ask and bring something useful.