SignalScout Radar

A free public page of people asking which product to use or buy, sorted by category. A product here is a physical thing: a gadget, a piece of gear, a tool, a part or a supply. It lives at radar.buyerfinder.run.

Every hour a worker searches Reddit, and the newest threads of 10 forums from different niches, for posts like "can anyone recommend…", "what do you use…" or "is it worth buying…". A free text rule sets most of them aside. One cheap model call per remaining post decides whether it really asks for a product, which category the product is in, and what the person wants. The page lists what survives: the category, the platform, a short excerpt, the age and a link to the post. Never a name or a handle.

It is also a demonstration. The fetching and the model calls are @signalscout/engine, used on its own with no account, no monitor and no product profile. If you want only the posts about your product, that is what SignalScout does.

Limits it keeps

• A daily spending cap (RADAR_DAILY_CAP_USD), providers and models together. The worker checks the price of every call before it makes it, and the day's spend is read from the database.
• An excerpt and a link. No username, no handle, no copied post, nothing older than 30 days.
• Taken down on request. A removed post is marked, not deleted, so the next run cannot put it back.

Running it

docker compose up -d        # Radar's own Postgres on 127.0.0.1:5439
cp .env.example .env        # fill in the keys; DATABASE_URL=postgres://radar:[email protected]:5439/radar
pnpm migrate
pnpm worker                 # a run every hour; add --once for one run
pnpm dev                    # the page on http://localhost:4321
pnpm test                   # needs the Postgres above
pnpm phrases [days]         # requests kept per dollar, per phrase

A push to main tests, builds one image and deploys it by digest to the box (.github/workflows/deploy.yml, scripts/deploy-remote.sh).

Backlog

Tickets share one id series with signalscout-open and signalscout-cloud, and follow the rules in the open repository's backlog/README.md.