What F5Bot is for
Use F5Bot when you need to know that a rare brand name was mentioned, and you will read every email yourself. The free tier is a raw alert. It does not know whether the thread is a buyer, a joke, or a post from last year that just got a comment.
What you still have to do
- Decide if the thread is worth opening.
- Check the sub's rules and your account's karma.
- Write the reply.
- Get there before the thread falls off the front page.
Karmy does that filtering. Each thread is scored for buying intent. The ping includes a draft in a human voice, inside Telegram, so it is not sitting under a receipt in your inbox. If you want the commenting done, a karmito posts on a warmed account with daily caps.
When to keep F5Bot
Keep it for exact-match brand monitoring across Hacker News as well as Reddit. Karmy is Reddit only, on purpose. A lot of founders run F5Bot for the brand name and Karmy for the 'what should I use for…' threads F5Bot cannot tell apart from noise.
There is a longer landing page on the same choice at the F5Bot alternative, with the side-by-side list.
A morning with each one
F5Bot morning: an email, or several, with a keyword and a link. You open Reddit, read the thread, decide it is a meme, archive the mail, and repeat. On a good day one of the ten mails is a person asking for a tool. You still have to write the reply before the thread drops. If you are in another tab, you are late. The tool did its job. The job was the alert.
Karmy morning: a Telegram message for the thread that scored as someone choosing, with a draft you can edit. Threads that are jokes or ancient posts do not ping you. You still approve the voice. If nothing scored, you get silence, which is better than ten emails you will train yourself to ignore.
The work F5Bot will not do
It will not tell you the sub's karma gate. It will not notice that your account is two days old. It will not draft the comment or stop you posting the same link five times. Those are the steps where accounts get removed. A firehose is honest about being a firehose. The mistake is expecting it to be a workflow.
Keep F5Bot if you need Hacker News and an exact brand string. Use Karmy for the 'what should I use' threads, which a keyword mail cannot rank. A lot of people run both for a month and then turn the keyword mail down, because the buying threads were never the ones with the brand name in them.