Monitoring X/Twitter mentions in 2026 without the enterprise price tag. What's actually working for you?

I run social for a couple of small brands, and half my week used to live in TweetDeck columns. That's over. XPro sits behind Premium now, and it's really a posting tool, not a listening one. So I went looking for what social people actually use to catch mentions and keywords on X, and there's almost nothing left in the middle of the market.

Rough breakdown by budget:

Free / near free

Native X search plus saved searches. Works, but you babysit it and there's no alerting.
IFTTT or Zapier off an X trigger. Flaky since the API changes, and rate limits bite fast.

Mid

Hootsuite or Sprout streams. Fine if you already pay them for scheduling, weak as pure listening.

Enterprise

Awario, Brandwatch, Meltwater, Talkwalker. They do the job well. But it's four figures a month and a sales call before you even see a price. Total overkill if all you need is "ping me when someone mentions my brand or a competitor."

Why the cheap middle died: X priced its API into orbit (the useful tier runs around $5k/month), so the small third-party tools that used to fill that gap can't afford to exist. You're left with free-but-manual on one end and enterprise-or-nothing on the other.

Full disclosure, I got fed up and built my own thing for this (webclaw, open source, has a free tier). No X developer account or API bill needed. You point a monitor at a profile, a keyword, a list, or the replies under a specific tweet, filter by likes / language / keyword, and drop retweets if you want. Alerts land in Discord through a webhook, so if you'd rather get them by email you can forward that webhook to your inbox. It's deliberately narrow: X only, no historical dashboards, no follower-growth charts, no sentiment scoring.

Where it falls short, so nobody's surprised: if you need real cross-platform listening, six-month trend graphs, or client-ready reports, the enterprise suites still win and I'd point you at them. The lightweight route only makes sense if your actual job is "know fast when X says something about us."

So what are you all using post-TweetDeck? Especially if you track competitor mentions or reply threads on a budget. Are you paying for a full suite just to cover X, or stitching something cheaper together?

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BP041•about 3 hours ago•1

n8n with an X API cron job polling every 15 minutes gets you Slack alerts for a few brands without leaving the free tier. No dashboard, but push notifications work way better than babysitting saved searches.

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