BYO keys (BYOK), by design
You bring your own API keys, so there is no central account a platform can cut off and no usage we meter or mark up.
AI-filtered signal · Built for developer relations
Never miss what developers say about you.
BackTalk watches Hacker News, Reddit, GitHub, Stack Overflow, Bluesky, YouTube and more. AI filters the noise. You get one inbox, plus a daily or weekly briefing that runs your week.
7-day free trial · no credit card required
Hacker News · Ask HN · 26h ago · 34 commentsUnanswered
Best way to handle your-product webhooks in Next.js? Docs feel scattered…
Question92% relevant
Reddit · r/SideProject · 5h ago · 41 upvotesReplied
Shipped payments with your-product this weekend, smoother than expected.
Your digest is ready: 47 mentions, 3 need attention, sentiment +12.
Built for developer advocates and DevRel teams, founders doing their own outreach, and maintainers who want to hear their community without watching a dozen tabs. And nothing covert: BackTalk never posts as you or joins communities you don’t own. Replies happen on the native platform, by you, via deep link.
For developer relations
Your day-to-day in DevRel, caught and sorted
Developers rarely @-mention you; they just talk. BackTalk listens where they actually are, and turns the firehose into a handful of moments that need a human reply. Catch these conversations as they happen, or batch them into a daily or weekly briefing. Here is what that looks like on a normal week.
- Question
Answer developers where they’re already stuck.
Someone hits a wall wiring up your SDK on Stack Overflow or Ask HN. BackTalk surfaces it with a relevance score and a deep link, so you can reply as yourself, on the platform, before the thread goes cold.
- Bug · Complaint
Catch friction before it turns into churn.
A developer vents about a broken webhook on Reddit. It lands in your needs-attention queue, tagged and prioritised, so you can route it to engineering and close the loop in public.
- Comparison · Lead
Show up while the decision is still live.
A team is weighing you against an alternative on Hacker News, or asking "what should I use for X?" You see it as it happens and join the conversation while your answer can still change the outcome.
- Praise
Turn a shout-out into a relationship.
A tutorial, a launch thread, a kind word on dev.to or YouTube. Star it, thank the author, and grow the advocate network that quietly compounds into your best channel.
- Daily · weekly digest
Prove DevRel’s impact without a spreadsheet.
One digest, daily or weekly, your call: mentions found, sentiment trend, response rate, and what is still unanswered. Exec-ready numbers that make the case for your team when budgets are set.
- Agent-native
Ask your AI assistant, not another dashboard.
Point Claude at your own BackTalk.sh Inbox over MCP, ask "what did the community complain about today?", and get an answer from what BackTalk actually caught, not a fresh web search.
How it works
Three steps between you and a calm inbox
No dashboards to watch. Highlights what social conversations are important to you, filters, tags and groups them by what actually needs your reply.
- 01
Watch
Add keywords once. BackTalk.sh polls every source with cursors and dedupe, so nothing is fetched twice and nothing slips through.
- 02
Filter
Every match runs through AI relevance and intent checks. Job ads and crypto spam die here. Questions, complaints, praise and leads get tagged.
- 03
Act
One inbox with needs-attention on top. A daily or weekly digest that writes your status report for you and your team.
The AI
AI reads every mention, so you don’t have to
BackTalk's AI does the first pass then hands you the short list that actually needs you.
- 92% relevant
Relevance filtering kills the noise
The wrong "Prisma" (the band, not your database), job ads and crypto spam are gone before they reach you. Every mention that survives comes with a relevance score, so you only read what's actually about you.
- negative
Sentiment reads the room
Each mention is scored positive, neutral or negative, and your digest plots the trend with the threads that moved it. So a bad week is a number you can see instead of a feeling.
- urgent
Priority tells you what's on fire
An AI rank from urgent to low puts the churn-risk complaint at the top and the nice-to-have at the bottom. You answer what needs a reply in hours, not whatever happened to be newest.
- bug report
Auto-categorisation + buying intent
Every conversation is labelled (question, bug report, complaint, praise or comparison) and rated for intent from high to low. Filter to just the bug reports for engineering, or just the high-intent posts where a deal is live.
- your model
Bring your own AI model
Run the filtering on our AI, or plug in your own LLM key (Claude, for instance). You get the newest models on your own keys, and we never use your content to train anyone's model.
- MCP
Ask your assistant directly
An MCP server lets Claude or any agent query your own BackTalk inbox. Ask "what did developers complain about today?" and the answer comes from what BackTalk caught, not a fresh web search.
The product
An inbox and a briefing, not another dashboard
Dashboards demo well and retain badly. BackTalk.sh is built around the two surfaces you will actually open.
The signal inbox
- Needs-attention group: unanswered questions and complaints, oldest first.
- Every mention tagged: question, complaint, praise or lead, with relevance.
- Thread-follow keeps watching comments on anything that matched.
- Seen, replied, ignored, starred. State that survives from one digest to the next.
The daily or weekly briefing
- Everything found since your last digest, deduped and grouped by watcher.
- Sentiment trend with the threads that drove it, one click away.
- Response rate and unanswered count, ready for the exec report.
- Lands in email and Slack, daily or weekly. Your day starts here, not in 12 tabs.
Coverage
Every source labelled honestly
Including the ones nobody can monitor. If a platform is closed, we say so instead of selling you a checkmark.
- MVP
Hacker News
posts and comments
- MVP
Reddit
your own API key, or via Brave
- MVP
GitHub
issues, discussions, code
- MVP
dev.to
posts and comment threads
- MVP
Substack
via Brave web index
- MVP
Medium
via Brave web index
- MVP
LinkedIn
public posts only, via Brave web index
- MVP
Stack Overflow
questions and answers across the Stack Exchange network
- MVP
YouTube
video titles and descriptions, official API
- MVP
Bluesky
public posts via the official AppView search, no key needed
- Planned
RSS / any blog
- Planned
Mastodon
- Planned
Lobsters
- Planned
Web discovery
any blog or docs site
- Planned
Product Hunt
- Planned
Discord (your server)
- Planned
Slack (your community)
- Planned
npm / PyPI stats
- Add-on
X / Twitter
their prices, not ours
Not possible for anyone.
- No keyword search in the official API, and near-zero developer signal.
- Facebook Groups
- Meta removed all third-party access in April 2024.
Compare
How BackTalk.sh compares
Every tool below is good at what it was built for. This table shows where each one listens and how each one is built, so you can pick the right tool, even if it is not ours.
| BackTalk.shAI dev-signal monitoring | Octolensreal-time DevRel monitoring | Common Roomenterprise community intelligence | Brand24broad social listening | Syftenindie keyword alerts | F5Botfree email alerts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where it listens | ||||||
| Hacker News | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| GitHub | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Stack Overflow | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Stack Exchange | No |
| dev.to | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| public posts | Yes | your own page only | limited | No | No | |
| Substack & Medium | Yes | newsletters | No | as blogs | as blogs | No |
| YouTube | Yes | Yes | chosen channels only | Yes | Yes | No |
| X / Twitter | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | No |
| Bluesky | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| How it is built | ||||||
| Bring your own API keys | Yes | No | No | No | No | No |
| MCP server for AI agents | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Pricing | flat, from $19/mo | metered, from $159/mo | enterprise, from $2,100/mo | monthly subscription | monthly subscription | free |
Compiled from each vendor's public documentation. Spotted an error? Email us and we will fix it.
Built different
Opinions we will not compromise on
An inbox, not a dashboard
Seen, replied, ignored, starred. Cursors, dedupe and thread-follow underneath. State is the product, and it is exactly what a scheduled AI prompt can never give you.
No covert anything
BackTalk.sh never posts as you, never joins communities you do not own, never resells data. Replies happen on the native platform, by you, via deep link.
Agent-native from day one
An MCP server on every plan. Ask Claude what the community complained about today or this week and get an answer from your own BackTalk.sh Inbox, not a fresh web search.
Pricing
Simple plans. No mention meters.
Unlimited mentions with no overage bills: you bring your own keys, so there's no usage.
Solo
For a developer keeping an ear on their own project.
$19/month
- Up to 10 keywords, 5 variants each
- 1 seat
- Daily auto-sync
- 3 manual syncs / day
- Everything below, included
Pro
Most popularFor the DevRel-of-one covering products, SDKs and competitors.
$99/month
- Unlimited keywords, 15 variants each
- 1 seat
- Hourly auto-sync
- 6 manual syncs / day
- Everything below, included
Business
For a DevRel team sharing one inbox.
$250/month
- Unlimited keywords, 25 variants each
- Unlimited seats
- 15-min auto-sync
- Unlimited manual syncs
- Priority support
- Everything below, included
Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial. No credit card required. Cancel anytime.
Every plan includes
- Every source and every feature, nothing gated
- Unlimited mentions. No overages, ever
- AI relevance, intent and sentiment filtering
- Unlimited watchers to group keywords your way
- Daily and weekly digests to Slack, Discord and email
- API, webhooks and MCP server
- Bring your own API keys, so there is no usage we can meter or mark up
- Owner-tunable sync cadence: slow it down any time to save on your keys
- 12 months of history
FAQ
Questions people actually ask
Including the awkward ones.
Can BackTalk.sh monitor LinkedIn?
Public posts. LinkedIn has no official API for keyword monitoring. BackTalk.sh covers what can be covered cleanly: public LinkedIn posts surface through the Brave Search web index, fetched with your own Brave API key, and land in your inbox next to everything else.
What does the AI actually do?
A lot of the work. Every mention runs through the AI relevance filter. What survives is scored for sentiment (positive / neutral / negative), ranked by priority from urgent down to low so you know what needs a reply within hours, and categorised (question / bug report / complaint / praise / comparison). You can run it on our AI or bring your own LLM key, Claude for instance, so you get the newest models on your own terms.
Why not just run ChatGPT or Claude on a schedule?
A scheduled AI prompt is stateless: every run re-searches from zero, has no idea what you already saw or replied to, and rides web search indexes that lag by hours or days. Monitoring is a state problem. BackTalk.sh keeps per-source cursors, deduplicates everything, tracks replied and ignored, and spends AI tokens only on genuinely new items. Your agent is still welcome: the MCP server lets Claude or ChatGPT query your BackTalk.sh Inbox directly.
What does bring-your-own-keys (BYOK) mean?
Each platform (Reddit, Brave Search, your LLM) is accessed with your own developer key instead of one giant central account. That means no surprise bills, no usage we can meter or mark up, and if one source ever objects, only that source pauses.
Does BackTalk.sh post or reply on my behalf?
No. Every reply happens on the native platform itself via a deep link by you. BackTalk.sh never auto-posts, never joins communities you do not own, and never monitors private spaces.
Do you resell the data you collect?
No. We never resell content or per-person data, both because platform terms forbid it and because it would be a terrible thing to build a trust product on. We also never use your workspace content to train AI models.
Hear what developers say. Start free today.
Spin up your inbox in minutes. AI filters the noise, scores what matters, and hands you the handful of mentions that actually need you.
7-day free trial · no credit card required.