subscope

subscope

subscope reads Reddit for you and hands you the threads worth replying to: the people shopping for what you sell, and the questions you can answer to build authority.

Run it whenever you want. Each scan returns 5 to 12 ranked threads in your Claude Code chat, split into two tracks:

Buyer signals · someone is shopping, a reply moves a deal Authority plays · no buyer yet, a reply builds credibility

You read them, decide where to jump in, and reply yourself: engage a potential buyer, or build your authority.

Keyless. No OAuth, no API key, no Reddit account. It reads Reddit's public RSS feeds. Free, MIT, local.

It never posts for you. Not an alert firehose, not a Reddit growth bot, not a $20 to $100 a month alert subscription. subscope finds the thread. You write the reply.

/plugin marketplace add dancolta/subscope   # register the marketplace (one time)
/plugin install subscope@subscope           # install the plugin
/subscope-onboard       # one-time targeting setup (~5 min), ends with your first scan
/subscope-run           # every scan after that

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What a scan returns

You run /subscope-run. A few seconds later, two ranked lists land in chat:

BUYER SIGNALS  ·  someone is shopping, a reply moves a deal
[T1] r/RevOps      14h · 92 · pricing-rage    "HubSpot renewal +28%, anyone moved off?"
[T1] r/SalesOps     6h · 88 · churn           "Canceling Apollo, what do you use instead?"
[T2] r/B2BSaaS      3h · 74 · alternative     "Alternative to Salesforce under 25 seats?"

AUTHORITY PLAYS  ·  no buyer yet, answer to build presence
[A]  r/Entrepreneur 5h · 61 · question        "How do you handle multi-entity invoicing?"
[A]  r/smallbusiness 9h · 58 · question       "Best way to track recurring client work?"

Each line is a live thread with a clickable link, ranked by how much your reply is worth and how fresh the window still is. Click in, read the room, write a comment that helps. That is the whole loop.

Why two tracks. Most tools stop at "someone mentioned your keyword." subscope splits the result. Buyer signals are demand you can capture now. Authority plays are the questions where showing up as the helpful expert compounds, builds the karma and history that make your buyer-signal replies land later, and keeps your account from looking like it only shows up to pitch.

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Who this is for

Anyone who sells anything. The onboarding adapts to your exact offer, you do not need to be a SaaS founder.

• B2B SaaS (per-seat, analytics, PM, HR): catch "30-person team, Notion is a mess, what's next?" while the OP is still reading replies.
• Sales or marketing tools (CRM, outreach): catch "Apollo just hiked us 40%, who's everyone moving to?" before the vendor pile-on hardens into a shortlist.
• Agency or freelance (marketing, RevOps, dev): catch "need a Webflow dev who knows e-commerce, 4 weeks" while you can still write something different from the eight identical pitches.
• Developer tools (API, framework, infra): catch "anyone moved off Temporal at scale?" while they are comparing, not after they have committed.

The edge is timing. subscope returns the thread while it is still forming, because you ran a scan early, not because anything was watching around the clock.

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The 8 signals it catches

Each pattern has its own scoring path. A pricing-rage thread and an alternative-seeking thread rank separately because they are different buying moments.

Pattern	What it captures
pricing-rage	Public anger about a renewal hike
churn	"Looking to ditch X for..." threads
build-vs-buy	Debates with actual numbers attached
rfp-bait	A vs B vs C comparison threads
stack-audit	"Help me cut tools from my stack" posts
alternative-seeking	Explicit "alternative to X?" threads
resurrect	Quality threads aged 6 to 18 months still getting traffic
rivals	Any mention of a brand in your competitive set

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What you do day to day

Command	What it does
/subscope-run	Manual scan. 5 to 12 threads land in chat as Buyer signals + Authority plays, with pattern badges. Posts under 24 hours old get a freshness boost so first-mover threads surface even when the keyword gate barely catches them.
/subscope-judge <n>	Deeper read on a single thread. Returns the intent and a reply angle. It does not write the reply.
/subscope-tune	Mark surfaces good / bad / meh. The ranker back-propagates your judgments into per-sub weights and keyword scores, so the list sharpens to your niche the more you use it.

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How it works

Three steps.

1. Onboard once. /subscope-onboard asks what you sell, who buys it, and what they complain about, then builds a targeting profile from your URLs, your competitor brands, and live Reddit threads matching your actual pain phrasing. This is mandatory first-run, there is no generic template.
2. Run on demand. /subscope-run fetches new posts from your subs, filters low-quality authors, ranks what is left, and returns the two-track list.
3. You reply. You open the threads, decide which are worth your time, and write the comment yourself on Reddit.

You will not see a single scored post until the flow ends. That is the tradeoff for targeting built around your offer instead of a SaaS-founder template.

1. Paste URLs. Homepage plus optional case studies, blog, or pricing. subscope scrapes them silently while you answer the next questions, pulling positioning, competitor names, buyer titles, and pain phrasing.
2. What do you sell? One line.
3. Who buys it? A job title is enough.
4. What is the pain? A real customer quote is gold. Paraphrase is fine.
5. Confirm the targeting card. What you sell, buyers, pain pattern, competitor list, and recommended subreddits, each with a relevance score. You are confirming the sub names; the first scan validates them by actually surfacing. Reply go, or tell the flow what to fix.
6. Connect integrations (optional). One menu: DataForSEO, Firecrawl, Notion, Slack, Obsidian. Reply skip for any or all.
7. First scan runs.

The flow writes config to ~/.config/subscope/ (subreddits, keywords, brand-anchor, example-pains). Refine later with /subscope-profile: redo the competitor anchor, rebuild pain language, swap a subreddit, just the section that drifted.

When you onboard, subscope does not hand you a generic list of r/SaaS and r/Entrepreneur. It searches Reddit for people discussing what you sell and scores each community by how well it fits your offer.

1. Live search, not a template. subscope searches Reddit in real time using your own pain phrasing and your competitors' brand names. Two people selling different things get different subreddits.
2. A relevance score, and a real offer signal required. Each candidate gets a 0-100 relevance score. A subreddit only makes the list if it carries a genuine offer signal: your category vocabulary, or one of your competitors named in its threads. Communities that merely share a generic word ("alternative", a pricing gripe) are dropped, not ranked.
3. Claude reviews every candidate. A keyword pass finds candidates, then Claude (running the plugin) reads each one and drops the false positives keyword matching cannot catch: career questions ("Software Engineering vs Dentistry"), self-promoters, and brand-name collisions (the law tool "Clio" vs the Renault "Clio").
4. The list is where it looks first, not a fence. Every /subscope-run judges each post against your offer, so a strong buyer in a community you did not list still surfaces. The first scan is what proves a sub, by actually surfacing one.

Precision over volume, on purpose. In a narrow niche you might see one to three subreddits, or an honest "no clearly relevant communities yet, what vertical are you in?" That beats padding the list with noise.

The Claude-side skills run the conversation. A small Python engine does the mechanical work, and it is deliberately keyless.

1. Keyless fetch, with failover. subscope reads Reddit's public RSS feeds. No OAuth, no API key, no account. If the primary Reddit host returns a 403 or a network blip, it fails over to a second Reddit host automatically, so one bad response does not kill the run. A genuine rate-limit (HTTP 429) is respected and reported, not worked around.
2. A recall pre-filter, not a verdict. The engine drops only the clear-cut rejects (NSFW, removed, vendor self-promo, off-topic subs) and passes everything else through as a candidate, tagged with plain features: which of your competitor brands it names, which of your keywords it hits, whether it reads as a question or a complaint, and how fresh it is.
3. Claude judges each candidate against your offer. This is the part that decides what you see. Claude reads every candidate against what you sell, who buys it, and the pain you described, then sorts each one into BUYER (a reply could move a deal), AUTHORITY (a helpful reply builds credibility, no buyer yet), or dropped. A post that only name-drops a brand but is really a patient or career question gets dropped. Every surfaced post carries a one-line reason. Keywords are the net that gathers candidates, not the thing that decides relevance.
4. A quiet day is never a dead end. When nothing clears the bar you get the count of what was scanned, the closest near-misses, and how to widen, not a blank "nothing found."

Everything runs on your machine. The engine writes only to local SQLite, sends nothing anywhere, and the JSON it emits could pipe into any orchestrator, not just Claude Code.

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subscope vs the alternatives

GummySearch was the go-to for Reddit buyer research. It shut down in November 2025. subscope is the free, keyless tool that does the high-intent part it was loved for.

	subscope	GummySearch	Syften / F5Bot	Manual
Price	Free, MIT	shut down 2025 (was $29 to $199/mo)	Syften from $19.95/mo, F5Bot free	Free
Keyless: no OAuth, no API key, no account	✓	✗	✗	partial
Ranked, author-vetted shortlist (not raw alerts)	✓	partial	✗	✗
Buyer-signal vs authority-play split	✓	✗	✗	✗
Human-in-the-loop, never auto-posts	✓	✓	✓	✓
Local-only data, zero telemetry	✓	✗	✗	✓
Runs inside Claude Code, reply in context	✓	✗	✗	✗
Freshness-boosted first-mover surfacing	✓	partial	partial	✗

Pricing current as of May 2026: GummySearch closed Nov 30 2025, Syften plans run $19.95 to $99.95/mo, F5Bot's core is free. Verify before relying on competitor cells.

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FAQ

What is subscope and what does it do?