Affordable Social Listening Tools Under $100 (2026)

Every entry price, verified on September 5, 2026

Nineteen entry plans, sorted by what you actually pay in month one. The fourth column is the one no comparison post publishes: not the marketing bullet, but the literal limit printed on the pricing page.

Two things fall out of that table. First, only six paid plans in the whole list still start under $50 a month, and only four of them do it without asking for a year up front: F5Bot Silver and Gold, Syften Entry and Buska Starter. Every one of them bought its low price the same way, by narrowing what it watches. F5Bot covers three sites. Syften Entry gives you a hundred community results a day. Nobody stayed cheap while staying broad. Second, the middle of this market has quietly emptied. There is nothing at all between $99 and $159, and the two names most people still type into Google as budget options, Brand24 and Mention, are no longer budget options at all.

Four signs the cheap end of social listening is closing

This is not a vibe, it is four things I could check today. Each row below is a claim you can verify yourself in under a minute.

Hootsuite belongs in the same story without quite making the list: its plan cards carry no numbers at all, and the only prices on the page sit in body copy, "$99 for a Standard plan, $199 for a Professional plan, and range up to $399 for an Advanced plan". Sprout Social does something similar with listening itself, selling it as an add-on to Standard and above rather than as a line item with a price.

The number nobody puts on a pricing page: cost per HOT post

A mentions cap is not a benefit. It is a raw volume number, and volume is not what you are buying. What you want is the count of posts where someone is actually in the market. In our State of Buying Intent 2026 study we classified 451,903 posts over 60 days and found that 1.4% of them scored HOT, meaning a person describing a need they would pay to solve. That rate turns a mentions cap into something you can compare across vendors.

Apply 1.4% to each entry plan's published cap and you get the ceiling on qualified conversations that plan can produce in a month, plus what each one costs you.

Read that as a ceiling, not a promise. It assumes your mentions look like the 451,903 we classified, and nobody's feed is average. But the spread is the point: the same $1 buys you a hundred times more qualified conversation on one plan than on another, and none of these vendors will tell you that, because none of them publish the denominator. Brand24 and Determ are not overpriced tools. They are priced for brand monitoring, where 1,000 mentions of your own name is plenty, and mispriced for lead generation, where it is nothing.

One caveat that cuts the other way: a bigger cap only helps if the extra volume comes from dense sources. Our study found Reddit supplied 69% of total volume and 77% of all HOT posts, while LinkedIn had the highest density at 2.55% HOT versus 0.36% on Hacker News and GitHub. A 30,000-mention cap fed mostly by low-density sources will not hit 420. This is also why a free Reddit-and-Hacker-News tool is not the joke it looks like: three sites, but three sites that carry most of the supply.

I have deliberately left Buska out of that table. We sell signals, not mentions, so there is no published cap to divide, and inventing one to make our own row look good would be exactly the kind of number this page exists to argue against.

What free actually gets you

Google Alerts

Free, and worth setting up in the ten minutes it takes, but it watches indexed web pages. Not Reddit threads, not X replies, not LinkedIn comments, not Quora answers. If your buyers describe their problem inside a community rather than on a blog, Google Alerts will never see it. Use it for press and for your own brand name, not for demand.

F5Bot Free

Zero dollars, no credit card, and it has been running since 2017 with over 430,000 alerts delivered daily according to its homepage. You get keyword alerts across Reddit, Hacker News and Lobsters with basic filtering flags, delivered by email. Given that Reddit alone accounted for 77% of the HOT posts in our study, this free tier reaches more real buying intent than most $99 dashboards. What it will not do is tell you which of those alerts matters, which is the whole job when your keyword returns 200 hits a week.

Social Searcher

Its own homepage now states the service is "completely free to use" with "unlimited searches" and "no registration required", and I could not find a plans page at all. Treat it as a manual search box across public social posts rather than a monitoring product: there is nothing to alert you, so you have to remember to look.

Under $50 a month: the three real options

Twenty keywords, advanced filtering flags, full post text in the email, no ads. The cheapest paid monitoring you can buy that a professional would actually use. Gold at $49.99/mo adds 200 keywords, RSS and JSON feeds, AI filtering and Slack or Discord delivery, which puts a real workflow inside a coffee-a-week budget. The ceiling is the coverage: three sites, no LinkedIn, no X, no Quora, no review sites, and no scoring beyond the filters you write yourself, which is the gap our F5Bot comparison covers.

Three community filters, 100 community results a day, one web filter with five results a day, and a seven-day archive. Syften's entry plan is honest about being small, and the seven-day archive is the detail people miss: you cannot go back and mine the last quarter, you can only watch forward. Standard at $49.95/mo and PRO at $119.95/mo widen the filters. See our Syften comparison for the coverage detail. Good fit if you sell to developer and indie communities and you are happy writing your own boolean.

Three topics, unlimited keywords inside each topic, 30,000 new mentions a month and one seat. On raw volume per euro this is the best deal in the entire table, and the toggle is worth watching: €29/mo only applies if you commit to a year, and it is €49/mo month to month. The catch is that 30,000 mentions arrive as an undifferentiated firehose with sentiment attached, not intent. You will be the filter, which is the trade we unpack on our Awario comparison page.

$49 to $99: where the work shifts from you to the tool

My own product, so read this with the appropriate suspicion. Starter is 5 signals monitored, 2 ICP profiles, 16+ sources, daily lead updates, Slack and Discord notifications, one automation workflow and one seat. The difference from everything above it in this section is that scoring happens before the alert, not after: each post is rated for buying intent and against your ICP, so what lands is a shortlist rather than a feed. What Starter does not include, and I would rather you knew before signing up than after: Reply Studio, API access, CSV export and lead enrichment all start on Growth at $99/mo, and 30+ sources plus the AI SDR agent start on Scale at $249/mo.

Three keyword rules, 5,000 monthly mentions and two users, at $49/mo on a yearly commitment or $69/mo if you pay monthly. Two seats at the entry tier is genuinely unusual at this price, and the jump to Essential is steep at $169/mo for 10 keyword rules and 15k mentions. Sentiment-led rather than intent-led, so it reads as a brand monitoring tool that a sales team can borrow.

Five keywords and 5,000 mentions a month. Note the billing wrinkle: the monthly option is billed quarterly at $99/mo, so there is no true month-to-month escape hatch. Pro is $249/mo annually and $299/mo otherwise. Strong on web and backlink-adjacent mentions, weaker as a source of conversations you can reply to.

One topic, unlimited keywords, 1,000 mentions a month, unlimited users, all AI features included. Unlimited seats at the entry tier is a real differentiator for agencies. The 1,000-mention cap is the problem for anyone doing lead generation: at our measured 1.4% HOT rate that is fourteen qualified conversations a month, and you will burn the cap on your own brand name before you get to demand.

Ten social accounts and a scheduling calendar. I include it because people search for it in this bracket, not because it competes: Hootsuite is a publishing suite that also shows you mentions of accounts you own. If your question is "who is talking about a problem I solve", this is the wrong shelf entirely.

Just above the line: what $159 to $199 actually buys

That is the annual price, and it is $199/mo month to month. Ten keywords with $10 per additional keyword, 15,000 mentions with $0.013 per extra mention, and unlimited seats. The pay-per-keyword model is the interesting part: it is the only tool in this table where you can buy exactly the eleventh keyword instead of the next whole plan. Scale is $499/mo with 40 keywords and 50,000 mentions.

Three keywords, 2,000 mentions a month, one user, AI sentiment analysis, at $249/mo if you pay monthly. Brand24 is a competent product that a lot of people still describe as the affordable option because it used to sit in that conversation. Today its entry plan costs four times Buska Starter and gives you 2,000 mentions, which is the smallest cap of any paid plan here except Determ.

One user and two alerts. BuzzSumo is a content research tool with monitoring bolted on, and two alerts is the tell. PR and Comms at $299/mo gets you 5 users and 5 alerts. Buy it for finding what performs, not for finding who is buying.

The trap in this row is that $79 per seat billed annually, $99 monthly, does not include listening. Sprout's own pricing page puts Listening in the Social Insights add-ons, "available as individual add-ons to the Standard plan and up", and Standard is $199 per seat/mo. So the real entry price for Sprout listening is $199 per seat plus an add-on with no published price, on a per-seat model that multiplies with your team.

Three tools I could not price today, and what to do about it

Mention shows a Company plan reading "Starting at $ Per month" with the number absent and a demo request in its place. Keyhole no longer has a pricing page: the URL redirects, via keyhole.co/contact-us/, to a Muck Rack demo request form. GummySearch is closed as of 11/30/2025. If a comparison article you are reading quotes a current price for any of these three, it was not checked. That is the practical reason this page exists.

How to choose in five minutes

How I checked these prices

I opened every vendor's own pricing page on September 5, 2026 and copied the figures as displayed, including the billing toggle. Where monthly and annual prices differ I recorded both, because "from $29" almost always means "from $29 if you pay for twelve months up front". Where a vendor showed no figure I recorded that rather than carrying forward a number from an older article. I did not use any third-party pricing aggregator, and I did not include a current price I could not see myself today. The one historical price on this page, GummySearch's, is cited to its archived pricing page. If you want the companion ranking by outcome rather than by price, I keep a separate list of social listening tools for lead generation. Two honest limits: I priced entry plans, so a feature you need may sit one tier up in a way this page does not capture, and I run Buska, which appears in the table.