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figures verified 2026-09-10

Octolens alternative

The price. Octolens Pro went from about $59 a month in 2024 to $159 a month on annual billing, $199 month to month, by 2026, and the most documented complaint about it on review sites and pricing teardowns is that it outgrew indie budgets. Parsa Khazaeepoul, dcouple’s founder and the person building discatch, was an Octolens customer and still had to chain other tools behind it for coverage.

What you keep

  • Keyword monitoring with boolean queries across social and developer sources.
  • An MCP server and a REST API with webhooks.
  • Relevance help: a prescore on every result, and a classify flag when you want a verdict.

What changes

  • Per-unit pricing with a quote before each call instead of a $159 or $499 a month annual seat ($199 or $599 month to month).
  • Catches push to your agent instead of your agent polling get_mentions.
  • Reddit, X, and LinkedIn are reserved on discatch until a direct path exists; their indexed posts arrive as web results in the meantime. Octolens covers all three directly.
  • Discourse forums are a first-class source with per-forum catches, not a Scale-only add-on with no page.

How to move

Three steps. Your AI assistant can do all of them with only the domain name.

  1. 1

    Get a trial key

    No email, no credit card, and a free amount of usage on free sources. Enough to try discatch on the terms you watch today.

    the agent does

    curl -X POST https://api.discatch.com/v1/keys/trial
  2. 2

    Get a price quote for your terms

    Turn each Octolens keyword into a search and price it. Before anything runs, discatch tells you the most it can cost. Compare that number to what you pay now.

    the agent does

    curl -X POST https://api.discatch.com/v1/quote \
  -d '{ "query": "\"your product\"", "sources": ["hackernews", "discourse", "web"], "since": "7d" }'
  3. 3

    Set up standing searches with a destination

    One standing search per term, delivered to a webhook, a Claude Code or Codex command, a Doozy todo, or email. Run both tools side by side for a week. Searches that find nothing cost nothing.

    the agent does

    curl https://api.discatch.com/v1/catches -H "Authorization: Bearer $DISCATCH_KEY" \
  -d '{ "name": "your product", "query": "\"your product\"", "sources": ["hackernews", "discourse", "web"], "interval": "15m", "destination": { "type": "webhook", "url": "https://example.com/hooks/discatch" } }'

Before you move

  • Export your keyword list. Each keyword becomes one catch, and catches are not limited or priced per keyword.
  • Note which sources you actually read. If Reddit or LinkedIn is most of your feed, discatch reaches them through the web index today and says so.
  • Check whether you use Scale-only sources. Podcasts, news, web, and newsletters on Octolens require the $499/mo annual plan.
  • Run both for a week. Catches that fire nothing cost nothing.

The price history

Octolens Pro was about $59 a month in 2024, about $119 a month in March 2026, and $159 a month on annual billing ($199 month to month) on 2026-09-10. That is a 34 percent rise on Pro since March. Scale went from $319 to $499 a month on annual billing in the same period, a 56 percent rise. Both figures are from a third-party teardown dated 2026-07-05 and the live pricing page.

What changes with per-unit pricing

On Octolens, 10 keywords on Pro cost $159/mo. The eleventh costs $10/mo more. An agent that wants to explore 50 terms for a week cannot do so without committing to a $599 Scale seat or paying $400/mo in keyword add-ons. On discatch, 50 searches cost 50 search units. A quote tells you the cost before each one runs. There is no keyword count to manage and no seat to maintain.

Questions

Is discatch cheaper than Octolens?

For most developers and agents, yes by design: units are fractions of a cent and the free tier covers free sources. A team that needs 50,000 mentions a month across every source will price differently; run a quote and compare it to $159 or $499 a month on annual billing.

Does discatch cover the same sources as Octolens?

Not yet. Today discatch reaches web, news, Hacker News, Discourse forums, Stack Exchange, and GitHub. Bluesky, Mastodon, YouTube, and Product Hunt are planned. Reddit, X, and LinkedIn arrive through the web index and are reserved until a direct path exists. Octolens covers Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, and YouTube directly today.

Can I move my Octolens keywords over?

The query language is the same shape: quotes, AND, OR, NOT, site:, author:, lang:. Each keyword becomes a catch, and catches are not limited or priced per keyword.

Does Octolens push mentions to an agent?

No. The MCP tools are pull-only. Webhooks reach n8n or Zapier, but nothing wakes an agent directly. discatch catches push to a webhook, a Claude Code command, a Codex command, a Doozy todo, or a GitHub dispatch.

Is the Octolens MCP server open source?

The FAQ on octolens.com/agents says yes, but the GitHub repo the npm package points to returns 404 on 2026-09-10. The public org has no CLI or MCP source repo. discatch’s clients are MIT.

What does Octolens charge for extra keywords?

$10 per month per extra keyword on Pro, $5 on Scale, as of 2026-09-10. discatch does not charge per keyword. A catch costs its firing units, not its existence.

Does Octolens have a free tier?

A free agent tier offers 50 searches with no card and the key never expires. There is no free monitoring tier. discatch’s free tier includes standing catches on free sources at one hour or slower.

Which sources are Scale-only on Octolens?

Podcasts, news, web, and newsletters require the $499/mo annual Scale plan on 2026-09-10. The "15+ platforms on every plan" copy elsewhere on the site is only true at Scale.

Last reviewed by , founder, dcouple. Octolens facts read on 2026-09-10 from octolens.com/pricing, octolens.com/llms.txt, octolens.com/mcp, octolens.com/agents, octolens.com/.well-known/mcp.json. Research: docs/seo/competitor-map.md.