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 few hours (RADAR_RUN_EVERY_HOURS) a worker reads the newest posts of
about 30 hobby, pet and craft subreddits, and searches Reddit for phrases such
as "can anyone recommend…" or "is it worth buying…" (and, when
RADAR_PLATFORMS turns them on, public Facebook groups and the newest threads
of 10 forums from different niches). 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 RADAR_RUN_EVERY_HOURS hours; add --once for one run
pnpm worker --backfill # the Reddit plans turned on, three days back, on RADAR_BACKFILL_CAP_USD
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.
