Hear who needs your product, minutes after they say it.
Earshot is a self-hosted buying-intent radar for the open social web. It sweeps Hacker News, Bluesky, Mastodon, Lobsters, Dev.to, Stack Exchange, GitHub and Discourse forums for conversations where someone is asking for a product like yours — scores each one for intent — and alerts you while the reply window is still open.
It never posts, replies, or DMs. Earshot finds the conversation; you show up as yourself.
GummySearch had 135,000 users when Reddit's commercial API pricing killed it in November 2025. Every hosted replacement inherits the same failure mode: platform API bills that scale with their user count, until the bill wins.
A self-hosted radar breaks that loop. One instance, one user, polite polling of public endpoints — the economics that killed the hosted tools simply don't apply. Your data stays in a SQLite file on your machine.
Docker:
git clone https://github.com/retrocodes12/earshot && cd earshot
docker compose up -d
# dashboard: http://localhost:3300Bare Node (≥ 22.5) — there is no npm install, the app has zero dependencies:
git clone https://github.com/retrocodes12/earshot && cd earshot
node server.jsThen create your first watch list — in the dashboard, or from the terminal:
node bin/earshot.mjs watch "YourBrand" \
--desc "One sentence: what you sell and who buys it." \
--keywords "your category,competitor alternative,problem your buyers describe"The radar sweeps every 3 minutes. Add ANTHROPIC_API_KEY to .env for real intent scoring (a built-in heuristic runs without it), and RESEND_API_KEY for email alerts (they print to the log otherwise). Full reference: deploy/env.example.
Earshot ships an MCP server, so any MCP client — Claude Code, OpenClaw, Codex — can watch the radar and act on it:
claude mcp add earshot -- node /path/to/earshot/mcp/server.mjs| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
earshot_leads |
Flagged conversations, best first, with score / why / URL / reply-window flag; filter by theme |
earshot_ask |
Natural-language question over the archive, answer cited to conversations |
earshot_search |
Full-text search over everything stored |
earshot_watch |
Create a watch list from a product description |
earshot_scan |
Trigger a sweep right now |
earshot_stats |
Watch lists and store counts |
"Check my radar every morning, draft replies to anything above 80, and show me before sending" is a working agent loop today. The agent drafts — the reply still goes out as you. See the never-posts principle.
There's a CLI with the same verbs: earshot scan, earshot leads, earshot watch, earshot stats, earshot mcp.
Every new conversation is scored 0–100 for buying intent against your product description — not keyword matching, intent reading. asking for recommendations beats mentioned the category beats wrote about the problem. Competitor mentions raise the score and get named in the reason. Conversations that are young and still quiet get an act-now flag: replies inside the first two hours land very differently from replies the next day.
Mark a lead as noise in the dashboard and the scoring learns your project's shape.
With ANTHROPIC_API_KEY set, scoring runs on Claude (batched, budgeted, capped per sweep). Without it, a transparent heuristic does its best. Either way the score's reason is always shown — no black-box verdicts.
GummySearch died with 135k users; Earshot rebuilds its working grammar on the open web. Where each piece lives:
| GummySearch | Earshot |
|---|---|
| Audiences (subreddit bundles + keywords) | Watch lists: brand + keywords + competitors per project |
| Themes: Solution Requests, Pain & Anger, Advice Requests, Money Talk | The same four categories, classified on every stored conversation — sidebar tabs with live counts. GummySearch's categories were curated intent-phrase sets; so are these, transparent and in src/themes.js |
| Hot Discussions / Top Content | sort=hot (comment velocity) and sort=top views |
| AI analysis per theme | "Analyze this theme": recurring phrase patterns always, AI narrative with a provider key |
| Ask (natural-language questions) | Ask bar → /api/ask: ranked matches always, cited AI answer with a provider key |
| Keyword alerts | Instant email alerts + optional EARSHOT_DIGEST=daily roundup |
| Historical archive search | Search bar over everything stored, /api/search |
| 130k subreddits | The open web instead: 8 sources, no Reddit, and that's the point |
| Source | Auth needed | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Hacker News | none | Algolia public API |
| Bluesky | app password | raises rate limits |
| Mastodon | none | set instances via EARSHOT_MASTODON_HOSTS |
| Lobsters | none | |
| Dev.to | none | |
| Stack Exchange | none | pick sites via EARSHOT_SE_SITES |
| GitHub | token optional | issues/discussions search |
| Discourse forums | none | any instance via EARSHOT_DISCOURSE_HOSTS |
EARSHOT_SOURCES=hn,bluesky narrows the set without a code change. Adding a source is one small file implementing the adapter contract — see src/sources/.
No Reddit: Earshot polls open public endpoints politely and stores no Reddit data. That's a licensing stance, not a technical gap — it's what keeps the self-hosted model clean.
- Earshot never posts. It has no write path to any platform. The moment a tool auto-replies at scale, every community it touches gets worse, and so does the signal. You answer as yourself, or not at all.
- Open web only. Public endpoints, polite intervals, honest user-agent.
- Your data is a file. One SQLite database. Back it up with
cp. - Readable verdicts. Every score comes with its reason.
One Node process: HTTP server + poll loop, node:http and node:sqlite, zero npm dependencies. The poll loop never overlaps itself; sources are cursor-based so nothing is fetched twice. ~2,000 lines total. It runs comfortably in 256 MB.
server.js HTTP + poll loop (one process, on purpose)
src/pipeline.js sweep: fetch → dedupe → score → alert
src/score.js intent scoring (Claude or heuristic)
src/sources/*.js one small adapter per platform
mcp/server.mjs MCP server (stdio, zero-dep)
bin/earshot.mjs CLI
Everything above is the default, ungated self-host experience. The optional hosted mode (accounts with trials, billing-webhook plan gating) activates only when EARSHOT_BILLING_URL is set — self-hosters can ignore that it exists.