Is Talkwalker free? Partly. The company runs two very different things under one name. Talkwalker Alerts is a free email alert service that anyone can sign up for in under a minute. The main product, now called Lumen by Talkwalker, is a paid social listening platform sold through a demo and a custom quote. If you landed here hoping to watch your name, your game or your favourite band online without paying, here is what each free option really gives you.
The free part: Talkwalker Alerts
Talkwalker Alerts works like a sharper Google Alerts. You type a topic, give any email address, and pick:
- Result types: news, X (Twitter), blogs or discussion forums.
- Language: one of 22.
- How often: as it happens, or less often.
- How many: all results, or only the best ones by engagement.
You can also use Boolean operators, such as quotation marks around an exact phrase, to cut noise. Alerts arrive by email, RSS or a Slack integration. It costs nothing, and Talkwalker says more than 600,000 people use it.
The limits are simple. It matches keywords, so a common word in your name brings in junk. It has no analytics. And it does not cover Reddit threads, YouTube comments or TikTok as separate sources.
The paid part: Lumen by Talkwalker
The full platform is a different thing. Its pricing page lists three plans, Core, Analyze and Business, and asks you to pick one to get a custom quote. No prices are shown. Every plan includes onboarding and strategy reviews with Talkwalker's team. It is built for brand and agency teams that need dashboards, image recognition for logos, and sentiment in more than 127 languages.
So no, there is no free Talkwalker plan for the platform itself, and no way to see the price without talking to sales.
A free way to start with smarter alerts
If keyword alerts are too noisy and a sales call is too much, AyeWatch sits in between. Instead of a keyword, you describe what you want in a sentence: "new videos or posts reviewing my browser game, skip my own uploads". Its AI reads each new item for meaning and sends an alert with a short summary.
The free tier is called Free Preview. Be clear about what it is: three monitoring runs in total across up to three topics, checked daily or slower, with no credit card. The runs do not renew. It is a trial, not a free plan you keep forever. It lets you see whether meaning-based alerts are worth paying for.
After that, Pro costs $9 a month and Pro+ $19 a month. Every plan, Free Preview included, gets alerts in the app feed and as push notifications on web, iOS and Android. Email alerts, Slack, Discord and webhooks are for paid plans.
Which free option fits you
| You want | Use |
|---|---|
| Free keyword alerts by email, forever | Talkwalker Alerts |
| To test alerts that understand meaning | AyeWatch Free Preview |
| Alerts on Reddit, YouTube or TikTok posts | AyeWatch, on a paid plan after the preview |
| Dashboards, sentiment and logo detection | Lumen by Talkwalker, by quote |
A quick setup for a game or a creator
Say you make a small browser game. A sensible start:
- Set a Talkwalker Alert on the game's exact name in quotes, news and blogs, weekly. Free and done.
- Use the AyeWatch Free Preview on the thing keyword alerts miss: "Reddit posts or YouTube videos where players talk about [game], including bug reports and comparisons with other games."
- If the second one finds posts the first one never did, it is worth $9 a month. If not, you have lost nothing.
The short answer
Talkwalker Alerts is free and stays free. Lumen by Talkwalker is not free and does not show its price. For alerts that read posts the way a person would, try the AyeWatch preview before you spend anything.