Is NewsWhip free? No. NewsWhip does not publish a free plan or any prices at all. Every product page, from Spike to the API, ends at a "Request a demo" button, and its pricing address returns a page-not-found error. It is sold to newsrooms, brands, PR agencies and government teams, now as "NewsWhip by Sprout Social" after the 2025 acquisition.
So if you are one person who wants to hear about a story, a game, a creator or a topic without a sales call, NewsWhip is not built for you. The good news is that the job you probably want done, getting a ping on your phone when something happens, has cheaper and free options.
What NewsWhip does, in one paragraph
NewsWhip watches web articles and social posts as they appear and measures how fast people engage with them. Its Spike product sorts stories by predicted engagement, so a publisher can spot a story before it peaks. It covers Facebook engagement, Reddit, X, YouTube and TikTok, and keeps years of history in a separate Analytics product. That is valuable for a newsroom. For someone following a hobby, it is a lot of machinery.
The options that cost nothing or close to it
| Option | Cost | What you get | Catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| AyeWatch Free Preview | $0, no card | 3 runs on up to 3 topics | It is a trial, not a lasting free plan |
| AyeWatch Pro | $9 a month | Up to 50 monitors, hourly checks | Paid, but no contract |
| Google Alerts | Free | Email when new search results match a keyword | Keywords only, email only |
| Talkwalker Alerts | Free | Keyword alerts from news, X, blogs and forums | No summaries, no filtering by meaning |
| Feedly | Free up to 100 feeds | A reader for sources you pick | You read, it does not alert |
Why AyeWatch is the pick for a phone-first person
AyeWatch is an AI monitor with apps for iOS and Android. You type what you want to hear about in normal words, such as "new seasonal events or patch notes for my favorite browser game, skip fan art and memes", and it checks the web and social platforms for you. When something matches, you get a push notification with a short summary and links to the sources.
Three things make it a good fit for someone without a team budget:
- Push and the feed are on every plan, including the free preview. You do not need to pay to get notifications on your phone.
- It watches pages, not only topics. Paste the link to a game's news page or a store page and get told when it changes in a way that matters.
- It reads social platforms too: X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok, with a plain-English filter so you only hear about matching posts.
The free preview gives you three monitoring runs across up to three topics, at daily or slower intervals, and the runs do not renew. That is enough to see whether the alerts are useful. After that, Pro costs $9 a month. Checks use monitoring credits, and the app shows the estimated credits per day when you pick an interval, so you can see the cost of checking more often before you commit. Email, Slack, Discord and webhooks are paid-plan extras.
When the free tools are enough
If you only want to know when a name appears in the news, Google Alerts or Talkwalker Alerts will do it for free. They match words, not meaning, so expect some noise, and they arrive by email rather than as phone notifications. If you like scrolling a list of headlines from sites you choose, Feedly's free plan is a calm way to do it.
When NewsWhip is still the right answer
If you work at a publisher or agency and your job is to find stories before they go viral, with engagement numbers to back the call, NewsWhip does something the tools above do not try to do. Ask your employer to book the demo.
The short version
NewsWhip is not free and has no public price. For personal alerts, start with AyeWatch's free preview, and fall back on Google Alerts or Talkwalker Alerts if you want something that never costs anything.