lurk
AnyAPI · Marketing · Business
lurk is an open source lead monitor that watches Reddit and X for people asking for what you sell, scores each post with a written reason, and sends the good ones to Slack.
About lurk
What Is lurk
lurk is a Reddit lead monitoring tool that also covers X (formerly Twitter). You give it your product URL, and it builds a profile of the problem you solve, the people who buy, the subreddits they post in and the searches they run. Then it scans those places on a schedule and shows you the posts where somebody is asking for something close to your product.
It reads more than a keyword. Each shortlisted post and comment gets opened in full, checked against your profile and scored from 0 to 100 on fit, buyer intent and how alive the thread still is. The card tells you the phrase that matched, a sentence of reasoning and the community's own self-promotion rule, so you know whether a reply is welcome before you write one.
Most Reddit monitoring tools stop at an email full of keyword hits. lurk is closer to an open source alternative to paid social listening suites: the scoring logic sits in a file you can read, the data is billed per request rather than by seat, and the source is MIT licensed. The hosted version at lurk.so runs on a free tier with a house data wallet. You can also clone the repo and run it in Docker with no app limits.
What lurk won't do is post, comment or send a direct message. It finds the conversation and hands it to you.
Getting Started
- Sign in to the hosted app at lurk.so, or clone the repository and run docker compose up.
- Paste your product URL and let lurk draft the profile: pain, solution, buyer, subreddits, keywords. Every field is editable.
- Set your keywords and the subreddits you want tracked, then press Scan now for the first run.
- Open a lead card to see the matched phrase, the score breakdown and the community rule.
- Connect Slack, Discord, email or a webhook in Settings, then pick the hour your daily scan should run.
Product Information
A quick look at lurk's pricing, supported platforms, and performance.
Best for
The users, tasks, and scenarios where this tool fits best.
Users
- Solo founders and indie hackers
- Growth marketers at small SaaS companies
- Content and SEO teams
Tasks
- Finding buyers in public threads
- Choosing which Reddit threads to answer
- Tracking competitor recommendations
- Feeding leads into an agent or CRM
Scenarios
- Launch week
- Planning next month's content
- Running marketing on a self-hosted stack
Key features
Product Profile From One URL
Paste your homepage and lurk reads the page, then asks a language model to describe the problem you solve, the buyer, the communities they use and the searches they make. You get a working profile in a couple of minutes, and you can edit every line. Starting from a URL is faster than the blank keyword box most monitoring tools hand you.
Scans That Read Whole Threads
Each keyword and tracked subreddit is searched on a schedule. Titles get a quick triage first, then only the shortlisted posts are opened and read in full, followed by the comments on the best of them. Cost follows the quality of the shortlist rather than the size of your keyword list, which is why lurk can run on a free data allowance.
Scores With a Written Reason
Every lead carries a 0 to 100 score built from fit, buyer intent and thread activity, plus an intent stage and the exact phrase that matched. A seller-side flag separates people promoting their own product from people shopping. You can judge a lead in seconds without opening Reddit.
A Feed That Shows the Room Rules
Filter the feed by time window, community and stage. Each card lists the poster, the subreddit, the age of the thread and that subreddit's own rule on self-promotion, pulled from its sidebar. The rule sits next to the post because a reply that gets removed is worse than no reply.
Alerts in Slack, Discord, Email or a Webhook
New leads go out as a digest with the score, the reason and a link. The free hosted tier includes a daily digest, Slack and Discord channels, and one custom webhook. Teams that live in chat get the lead without opening another dashboard.
Reddit SEO and Competitor Watch
lurk searches Google for your keywords, keeps the Reddit threads that already rank, and records their position and age. It also notes whether a competitor is named in the thread or recommended in the replies. A thread that already compares tools is a place where a careful answer still earns attention months later.
Read-Only API, MCP and MIT Source
The API exposes projects, leads and SEO rows over a bearer token, and the MCP server lets an agent triage the same data. Neither can post or send messages. The source is MIT licensed, so you can read the scoring prompts in src/lib/prompts.ts and change them. Self-hosting through Docker removes every tier limit.
Pros and cons
Pros
- The score comes with a sentence of reasoning and the matched phrase, so you can dismiss a weak lead without opening Reddit.
- Community promotion rules sit on the card, which cuts the chance of a reply getting deleted by a moderator.
- Reddit SEO turns a monitoring habit into a content play: the threads it finds keep ranking after the day you answer.
- The MIT source and Docker setup mean no vendor lock-in, and the prompts are editable files rather than a black box.
- The free hosted tier is usable for one project, with daily scans and 1,000 API reads a day.
Cons
- Reddit and X data is metered through AnyAPI, and scoring needs an OpenRouter key. A wide keyword list or hourly scans add real cost, so budget before you scale.
- The free hosted tier caps you at two projects, 25 keywords and 10 subreddits per project, with one scan a day.
- X lead monitoring runs as a beta feature and stays off until the instance sets X_LEADS. On the hosted app you see the tab only when it's enabled.
- There's no reply drafting, no posting and no inbox. You still write and send every answer yourself, in Reddit.
Frequently asked questions
lurk is an open source tool that finds people on Reddit and X who are asking for something like your product. It scans your keywords and communities, reads the matching posts, scores them and sends the good ones to your team.
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