Built a free social listening stack (no Brandwatch, no Mention)

Brandwatch starts at $1,500/month. Mention at $41/month caps at 3 platforms. Hootsuite's social listening tier is paywalled.

Built the same thing for $0/month (just LLM tokens):

→ AI agent with browser access scrolls X, LinkedIn, Reddit, Hacker News, and TikTok for mentions of your brand + 5 competitors
→ Extracts sentiment, volume, author profile (follower count, engagement rate)
→ Flags anomalies: sudden spike, negative cluster, competitor launch
→ Daily digest to Slack/Discord

The setup that makes it free:

• No API needed — agent reads the public feed like a user would
• Uses your real browser session so sites don't rate-limit
• Prompt describes what to pull, no selectors to maintain when X changes layouts again

Cost per day monitoring 6 brands across 5 platforms: ~$0.30 in LLM tokens. Brandwatch equivalent: $50/day.

The killer use case for indie founders: competitive launch detection. When a competitor launches on Product Hunt / X / Reddit, the agent catches it within the hour and flags the thread before it has momentum.

Full build guide with the agent prompt: https://www.browseract.com/blog/ai-social-media-monitoring-browseract