Show HN: I built a simple, reliable, and affordable brand monitoring service

That's what I love about SHOW HN!

Everytime I show a community or ask for feedback from a customer, things are brought up I would have not thought about on my own.

After I posted here yesterday, some leftover code was causing an error I did not spot and someone from HN was able to find it and point it out.

Thanks~

I submitted Brandchirps 7 months ago to SHOW HN, but didn't provide a usable way for you to try the product out ( I only had a paid sign up at that time ). My bad, I didn't read the rules entirely.

That caused some issues and I asked the HN mods to allow me to repost, this time with a free trial and updates!

So the free trial is here: https://brandchirps.com/amember/signup . Pick the 14 day free trial ( you will have to sign up through Paypal, but just cancel once signed up ).

I ALSO provided a video for those of you that don't want to sign up, but maybe want to learn more. It's on the front page https://www.brandchirps.com/.

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So what makes Brandchirps different?

I'm still trying to nail this down. I don't mind admitting that, but here goes the reason why I built it:

1. I was tired of using TalkWalker and not getting ALL the results I should have been. TalkWalker has a paid plan that more than likely fetches more results but its a yearly commit of $9,600. Brandchrips fetches more alerts than TalkWalker.

2. Google Alerts ( free ) didn't provide a lot of extra functionalty I needed. Things like sentiment analysis, metrics, CSV data export, etc. Brandchirps offers all of this in both of our 2 plans.

3. Many other paid services ( Mentions, BrandMentions, Awario, etc ) limit the number of total mentions/alerts you can get monthly. Brandchirps is unlimited in the number of mentions we grab for you monthly.

4. Pricing. Ignoring free alternatives, most of the paid services start at $49 or $99. Some have lowered their price since, but you get less keywords ( 2 or 3 ). The $49 plans competitors offer have 5 keywords. The next highest plan is typically $89 to $99 and offers 10-15 keywords at our competitors. Brandshirps offers you 5 or 20 keywords at either $6.95 or $15.95

5. Some services do not monitor daily for you. The ones that do, many only monitor once a day ( lowest tier plans ). Brandchirps monitors multiple times a day.

6. Many paid competitors treat data exporting, history of results, API, as paid "add ons" or only on higher tier plans. Brandchirps offers it on both our plans, starting at $6.95 a month

7. Some of the lower end/less known competitors are getting their data from Common Crawl, which only crawls part of the internet and can offer real-time monitoring. We do not use Common Crawl as we want full results in as fast as real-time as possible.

8. Alerting wasn't full featured at many similar services. I decided that for even our $6.95 plan, I wanted RSS alerting, JSON alerting, and up to 3 emails with a daily summary to alert me. This covers a lot of ground as multiple people can be alerted via email, RSS can be used in feed readers and Slack, and JSON could be implemented in custom builds for those that need it.

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I guess it boils down to, I wanted a way to provide a better value plan for those that didn't want to spend almost $100 monthly to get basic Brand/Keyword monitoring.

In the recent weeks, we added on the ability to hide/delete results you may have took action on already. And we are adding in ( in the coming weeks ) the ability to "star" or "favorite" results so they do not get deleted/removed after 365 days.

My goal is to help service small business and freelancers for now and then move up once everything is proven.

Once I am able to redesign the site and add on a few more features, I plan on raising prices and trying to attract higher end medium sized and entrprise clients.

I'd love to get some feedback. Sorry you have to sign up through Paypal and cancel ( it's free for 14 days ), but that is how my current billing system is setup.

Thanks James