HN Ping

Track who replies to you on Hacker News without keeping the site open

Problem

HN users want to know when someone replies in a thread, but there is no official notification system, so they manually check back. A recent HN post asked whether people use HN Replies or something else, showing this is an ongoing pain point.

Solution

A lightweight service where users link their HN username. It periodically scrapes new replies under their comments and submissions, then sends alerts via email, RSS, or Telegram. Users can opt to only get direct replies and ignore self-replies.

Users

Active HN commenters, founders and researchers who need to follow discussions

MVP

Subscribe with an HN username; scheduled scraping for new replies; email and RSS alerts; deduplication and self-reply filtering; simple dashboard for alert history

Revenue

Free daily digest; Pro subscription for real-time alerts and multi-channel push at ~$3/month

Why now

HN remains a core tech community but official notifications are still missing. Scraping public pages is cheap and scheduled jobs make this feasible for an indie developer.