Brand Mentions Monitor – Hacker News, Bluesky, News & GitHub

Find out who is talking about your brand, product or competitors – across Hacker News, Bluesky, Google News, Mastodon, Stack Overflow, GitHub and DEV Community – in one run. Schedule it and get only new mentions, with sentiment, share of voice, keyword alerts and viral-post alerts in Slack or any webhook, plus a shareable report.

• ✅ 7 public sources, one format: stories, comments, posts, articles, questions, issues and pull requests.
• ✅ Exact-phrase matching and exclude words to keep the noise out.
• ✅ Only new mentions mode for hourly or daily monitoring.
• ✅ Share of voice: add your competitors and see who gets talked about most.
• ✅ Sentiment on every mention, plus alerts for negative mentions, your keywords (outage, pricing, alternative…) and high-engagement posts.
• ✅ Real publisher URLs for news, engagement numbers (points, likes, reposts, comments) for social posts.
• ✅ Privacy-friendly: author handles are off by default.

Who uses it

You are	You get
Founders & DevRel	Every HN thread, Bluesky post, GitHub issue and Stack Overflow question about your product – in Slack.
Marketing & PR	News coverage and social buzz for your brand vs competitors, with share of voice.
Customer success & support	Complaints and "alternative to…" posts before they spread.
Investors & analysts	Momentum of a start-up or open-source project across communities.

How to use it

1. Add the names to monitor – your brand, product names, competitors, a campaign hashtag.
2. Pick the sources (default: all except GitHub, which is opt-in because developer tools get hundreds of pull-request mentions a day) and the look-back window.
3. For monitoring, turn on Only new mentions, set a Tracking name, add alert keywords and a Slack webhook, and schedule the run hourly or daily.

{
    "queries": ["Supabase", "Firebase", "Appwrite"],
    "lookbackDays": 7,
    "onlyNew": true,
    "trackingId": "baas-share-of-voice",
    "alertKeywords": ["outage", "pricing", "alternative", "switched to"],
    "engagementAlert": 50,
    "slackWebhookUrl": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/…"
}

Output

One row per mention:

{
    "query": "Supabase",
    "source": "hackernews",
    "sourceName": "Hacker News",
    "type": "comment",
    "title": "Re: Show HN: Open-source Firebase alternative",
    "text": "We moved from Firebase to Supabase last year and…",
    "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50192022",
    "publishedAt": "2026-10-22T06:45:21Z",
    "engagement": { "points": null, "comments": null },
    "engagementScore": 0,
    "sentiment": "positive",
    "sentimentScore": 2,
    "matchedKeywords": [],
    "customTopics": [],
    "isAlert": false,
    "alertReasons": [],
    "isNew": true
}

Other fields by source: newsSource and googleNewsUrl (news), repository (GitHub), tags (Stack Overflow, DEV), answered (Stack Overflow questions), language (Bluesky, Mastodon), linkUrl (HN stories), optional author. OUTPUT holds mentions per name and source, share of voice, sentiment split, alerts and the top mentions by engagement.

Pricing

Event	Price
Mention saved	$1.50 per 1,000 mentions ($1.20 on Gold and higher Apify plans)
Name checked (all sources)	$0.003 per name per run

Examples: 3 names, daily, ~40 new mentions a day in "only new mentions" mode ≈ $2.10 / month. Hourly monitoring of 1 name ≈ $2.20 / month plus mentions. The Apify free plan monitors up to 3 names per run.

FAQ

Why not X (Twitter), Reddit, Facebook or LinkedIn? They require a login or a paid API for search. This Actor only uses sources that are public without logging in.

How does Mastodon / DEV search work? Both are searched by tag – the name without spaces (e.g. #supabase). Add more hashtags or Mastodon servers in the source settings.

Is sentiment accurate? It is a fast, rule-based English word list – good for sorting and alerts. Export the mentions to your AI tool for deeper analysis.

Is it legal? The Actor reads public posts and articles through public endpoints, does not log in, and leaves author names out unless you turn them on.