Hacker News alerts and digests: 7 tools compared (2026)
Hacker News gets about 1,000 new stories a day, plus tens of thousands of comments. Somewhere in there are the two threads about your product, your competitor or your niche. You find them a week later, from a forward, when the thread is already cold.
Below: the tools that send you Hacker News keyword alerts or a digest by topic. Same columns for each, so you can compare.
hnwatch and hndigest are ours. They read only the public Hacker News API and never touch your HN account.
The comparison
| Tool | Price | Sources | Reads comments | Summaries | Try without signing up |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| hnrss.org RSS feeds, a format you open in a feed reader app. One feed per keyword, for stories or comments. No email, no summaries. |
free | Hacker News | yes | no | yes |
| F5Bot Email when a keyword appears in a post or a comment. Free for a few keywords. Also covers Reddit. |
free; 9.99 $ a month for 20 keywords | Reddit, Hacker News, Lobsters | yes | no | no |
| Syften Stories and comments, plus Reddit, X, GitHub and more. Sends to Slack, email or a feed. 14-day trial with an account. |
29.95 to 119.95 $ a month | Hacker News and 20+ other sites | yes | no | no |
| Octolens Built for marketing teams: many sites, relevance scores, tags. 7-day trial with an account. |
159 $ a month, paid yearly | Hacker News and 13 other sites | not stated | no | no |
| SnitchFeed Made for finding buyers across several sites. Scores each mention. 7-day trial with an account. |
from 59 $ a month (47 $ paid yearly) | Hacker News, Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Bluesky | not stated | no | no |
| hnwatch Checks stories and comments every 15 minutes. One email an hour at most. Sign in with your email; the first 7 days are free. |
9 € a month or 49 € once | Hacker News | yes | no | no |
| hndigest One email a day (or a week) with two lines on each story about your topics. Preview any topic below, no account. |
5 € a month or 29 € once | Hacker News | yes | yes | yes |
Competitor prices as shown on their sites on 2026-09-22. They change; check before you buy.
Which one to pick
- You already use a feed reader and want to pay nothing: hnrss.org.
- You watch Reddit too and a few keywords are enough: F5Bot.
- You need many sites, a team and a Slack channel: Syften, Octolens or SnitchFeed.
- You want only Hacker News, by email, at a small price: hnwatch for alerts within the hour, hndigest for one summary a day.
See it on your topic, right now
Type a topic. You get the Hacker News stories of the last 24 hours that mention it, two lines on each. No email, no card.
Questions
Does it read the comments too?
Yes. hnwatch checks new stories and new comments every 15 minutes. You get an email when your words appear in either. hndigest reads the comments as well: the two lines under each story come from the title, the post and the HN comments. It does not read the linked article.
How fast is the alert?
hnwatch checks Hacker News every 15 minutes and sends at most one email an hour. You usually hear about a thread within the hour, not a week later. hndigest is slower by design: one email a day at the hour you choose, or one a week.
Can I try it without an account?
Yes, for hndigest: type a topic on the preview page and see the last 24 hours on it. No email, no card. hnwatch needs your email to sign in. The first 7 days are free and we charge nothing before day 8.
Made by Team GiBSeS, a small engineering company working between Switzerland and Italy (GiBSeS OÜ, Tallinn). We build small tools that do one job. If a tool does not find enough paying users, we close it and email you a link to download your data.