Tools & keys · Communities

F5Bot setup

Real-time keyword alerts from Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters.

Recommended
Updated
Free tier
F5Bot's free plan includes keyword alerts with basic filters.
checked September 2026
Larvabot's cap
Nothing to cap: rate limits just hand the job to the next provider.
Fallback position
#1 of 6 for Reddit. See the order

What it does

F5Bot emails you when your keywords appear in new posts and comments. It matches exact phrases, ignores capitalisation, and offers filters such as whole words only or posts only.

  • Main source of Reddit and Hacker News threads
  • Each project gets its own keyword list, and alerts are routed by the exact keyword that matched

Get set up

  1. Sign up at f5bot.com with the inbox Larvabot reads
  2. Copy each project's keywords (and flags) from its Profile tab into F5Bot
Open f5bot.com

Where it goes

Nothing to paste into Larvabot. Once the steps above are done, it just works.

Staying free

No API calls at all: Larvabot reads the alert emails from your inbox, and alerts for keywords no project owns are ignored.

How the quota guard works →

Larva tip

F5Bot's free plan watches a limited number of keywords per account, shared across all your projects. The Profile tab shows which ones to add first.

Fallback order

For Reddit, Larvabot tries these in order and skips any that aren't set up, are out of free quota or are busy.

  1. 1F5Bot email alerts (via IMAP)
  2. 2Reddit API (legacy app OAuth)
  3. 3Reddit via Larvabot's relay
  4. 4Reddit public JSON
  5. 5Reddit RSS
  6. 6Web search (site:reddit.com)

More communities tools

Curious why F5Bot made the cut? F5Bot in the free stack →

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