---
title: "Complaint and switching signals about your competitors"
description: "Find public posts where people complain about a competitor or look for an alternative. Hacker News at launch; Reddit once we have licensed access."
url: "https://plainrival.com/features/complaint-signals"
published: 2026-09-30
---

# Complaint and switching signals about your competitors

Find public posts where people complain about a competitor or look for an alternative. Hacker News at launch; Reddit once we have licensed access.

Published 30 September 2026.

## 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

1. **Plainrival searches every few hours.** It looks for new public posts that mention each competitor you track.
2. **It sorts what it finds.** A complaint, a switching post or neither. Only the first two are kept.
3. **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

_Product preview: an illustrative example. Companies and changes are fictional._

Your AI assistant can search the same signals through the [Plainrival MCP server](https://plainrival.com/features/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.