Say someone posts in a Facebook group asking where to get custom name stickers for their kid’s school things. A few people reply in the first hour or two, someone drops a shop link, and by the next morning the person has usually already ordered. If your tool only checks once a day, you see that post when it’s already over.
That’s why I care so much about how often a tool searches. So this month I went through the pricing pages of other lead and listening tools, to see what hourly search really costs.
So I checked what hourly search costs
All prices are from each tool’s own pricing page in November 2026. Prices change, so check them yourself before you buy.
Brand24. The Individual plan is $249 a month ($199 if you pay yearly), and it updates every 12 hours. Hourly updates start on the Team plan at $349 a month ($299 yearly). Real-time starts at $499.
Octolens. It searches every hour on its cheapest plan, which is good, but that plan is $159 a month billed yearly. Real-time is on the Scale plan at $499.
Leadverse. One plan at $49 a month. Their page says “We scan your target subreddits every day.” Reddit only.
RedReach. Uses AI to filter posts, and says it delivers opportunities “to your inbox daily.”
BuyerFinder (that’s us). Every plan searches every hour. Starter is $20 a month, Plus is $40, and Agency is $140 for up to four businesses.
There’s also a group of tools that are fast and cheap, like F5Bot and KWatch. These are keyword alerts. They send you every post that has your word in it, and you read them yourself to find the real buyers. F5Bot’s free and $12.99 plans can take up to 2 hours to alert you, and its AI filtering starts on the $49.99 plan. If you’re happy to read every post yourself, a keyword alert tool is a good and cheap choice.
So the tools that use AI to pick out real buyers charge $159 to $299 for hourly search, or only search once a day. And we do it for $20. To see how, you first need to know where the money goes.
Where the money goes
Every search costs money twice. First the tool has to collect the posts. Then, if it uses AI to decide which posts are real leads, every post gets read by the AI, and that’s the part that adds up.
Search every hour instead of every day and you do 24 searches instead of one. And if the tool watches 15 or more places, like news, podcasts, TikTok, YouTube and review sites, every one of those 24 searches covers all of them. So it makes sense that hourly search sits on the big plans, because that’s where the money to pay for it is.
We deal with the same math. We just changed some of the numbers in it.
The small things first
We only read what’s new. Each hourly search looks at posts that came in since the last one. A post we already read last hour is skipped, so we never pay to read the same post twice. On a normal hour that’s a small number of new posts, not the same hundreds again.
A quick check first, a careful read second. A fast first pass throws out posts that clearly have nothing to do with what you sell. Only the posts that might be a lead get the careful read that decides if this person is really asking for something like yours. The careful read is the expensive part, and most posts never need it.
These help a lot, but they’re not the main reason. Plenty of tools do something like this too. The main reason isn’t about how we search. It’s about where we don’t.
The big one: what we leave out
Look again at that list of places the big tools watch. News, podcasts, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, review sites. We search none of them.
BuyerFinder only searches three places: Reddit, Facebook groups and forums.
That’s because we build for small businesses. A small shop, a local service, a maker selling on Etsy. For a small business, the useful posts aren’t people talking about your brand, because most people haven’t heard of you yet. The useful posts are people asking for the thing you sell, and those posts happen in communities where people ask other people for help:
- Reddit, where people ask in subreddits about their hobby or their problem, like sewing, pets or home repair.
- Facebook groups, where people ask their local area or their niche group for a recommendation.
- Forums, where people in one hobby have talked to each other for years, like fishing, cars or woodworking.
News sites, podcasts and video apps are great when people are already talking about your brand, and that’s what tools like Brand24 are built for. But for a small seller, those places mostly have people watching and commenting, not asking “where can I buy this?”
So remember the math from before, 24 searches a day across every place a tool watches. Cut those places down to the three where buyers actually ask, and each hour costs a lot less. We put that money into searching more often instead of searching more places.
To be fair, if you need to know every time a news site or a podcast mentions your company, BuyerFinder isn’t the right tool, and Brand24 or Octolens will serve you better.
What you get
We search every hour and email you when we find someone. Some hours there’s nobody new asking, and then we don’t email you. We won’t fill your inbox just to look busy.
If you want to see what it finds for your business, try a free search. It shows you real posts from people asking for what you sell, before you pay anything.