What it does
Plainrival finds public posts that mention your competitors and sorts them into complaints and switching posts, so you see who is unhappy and why.
- Complaints. A price rise, outages, missing features or poor support.
- Switching posts. People asking for an alternative or saying why they left.
- Opportunity reports. Ask for one and Plainrival groups the pains, missing features and quick wins per competitor, with quotes and links. Export it as Markdown or JSON.
Where the signals come from
At launch, from Hacker News, through its public search API. Each signal links to the post.
Reddit comes later, and only with licensed access to its data. We won't scrape it.
How it works
Plainrival searches every few hours
It looks for new public posts that mention each competitor you track.
It sorts what it finds
A complaint, a switching post or neither. Only the first two are kept.
You see who wants to switch
Signals show in the app and in your weekly brief, with a link to the post.
What it looks like
Signals
Complaints and switching posts · Hacker News
- Ask HN: Alternatives to Cedar Support after the price rise?Switching · Hacker NewsImportance 885 h
- Northwind CRM's API limits keep breaking our syncComplaint · Hacker NewsImportance 741 d
- We moved our invoicing off Lumen Billing. Notes insideSwitching · Hacker NewsImportance 693 d
Your AI assistant can search the same signals through the Plainrival MCP server.
Questions
Which sources does Plainrival use for signals?
Hacker News at launch, through its public search API. Reddit comes later, once we have licensed access to Reddit's data.
Why not Reddit yet?
For Reddit, using it properly means licensed access, which we don't have yet. We won't scrape Reddit or use its unofficial endpoints in the meantime.
Does Plainrival read LinkedIn, G2 or Capterra?
No. Plainrival doesn't scrape them and never reads pages behind a login.
How often are signals collected?
Every few hours. New posts show up in the app the same day.
What is an opportunity report?
A summary you ask for: the pains, missing features and quick wins people mention about one competitor, with quotes and links. Export it as Markdown or JSON.