Earshot

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.

Why this exists

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.

Quickstart

Docker:

git clone https://github.com/retrocodes12/earshot && cd earshot
docker compose up -d
# dashboard: http://localhost:3300

Bare Node (≥ 22.5) — there is no npm install, the app has zero dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/retrocodes12/earshot && cd earshot
node server.js

Then 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.

Give your agent ears (MCP)

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.

How scoring works

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.

The dashboard

<picture> <source media="(prefers-color-scheme: light)" srcset=".github/screenshot-light.png"> <img alt="Earshot dashboard: scored conversations, best first, each with the reason it was flagged" src=".github/screenshot-dark.png"> </picture>

The GummySearch feature map

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

Sources

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.

Principles

• 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.

Architecture

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

Hosted mode

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.

License

Apache-2.0