Why we built Monitr, and how it differs from Mention

The problem with generic monitoring

Mention is a solid product. It monitors social media, your brand name, competitor mentions. It's built for PR teams and marketing departments. It watches Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, news sites. It does what it sets out to do.

But app studios aren't the same as consumer brands or SaaS companies. We don't care if someone tweets about our company logo. We care when someone on Reddit says our app crashes on startup. We care when the App Store fills with one-star reviews about a server outage.

Mention wasn't designed for that. It's a broadcast monitoring tool. App reviews aren't broadcasts. They're signals. Direct, specific, often urgent.

Five sources, one unified signal

After that Friday bug story, we started asking our customers what they actually monitored. The answer was always the same: everywhere except where they'd expect. App Store reviews got missed. Google Play comments sat unread. Reddit threads surfaced on day three instead of day one. Twitter they caught, but only by accident.

We decided to build Monitr around the five places app feedback actually lives: App Store reviews, Google Play reviews, Twitter / X mentions, Reddit posts, and Google News. Not because those are the only places people talk. Because those are the only places that matter for a mobile studio.

Then we added the piece Mention doesn't do: classification. Every mention gets tagged as a bug report, feature request, crisis signal, positive feedback, or noise. An ML classifier does that work, not a keyword rule. A player saying their game "won't load on WiFi" and another saying "finally fixed the WiFi thing, love this app" don't both ping as generic mentions. One's a problem. One's validation.

The routing decision

Once we knew what kind of signal we were looking at, the next problem was obvious: where does it go? A bug report belongs in Linear or GitHub Issues. A feature request should hit Jira or Trackr. A crisis signal needs to wake someone up in Slack immediately. A positive piece of feedback might matter to your marketing team.

Mention sends everything to the same place: your inbox or a dashboard. You then decide what to do.

We built Monitr to route automatically. Set a rule once ("bug reports go to Linear", "crisis alerts go to #emergencies on Slack"). It happens every time, every hour. No triage. No second-guessing whether something deserves attention.

That's not sexy. It's just useful.

Correlation and the real story

Here's the part most monitoring tools get wrong. One one-star review on the App Store doesn't mean much. Two, maybe a pattern. Five reviews all saying the same thing within an hour? That's a narrative. That's something that needs attention.

We run hourly correlation detection across all five sources. If we see five signals pointing at the same issue from different places, Monitr groups them together and tells you. You see the real story, not a pile of raw mentions.

Mention doesn't do that. It would make their system more complex. For studios managing live apps and real-time player feedback, that complexity is the point.

Crisis first, everything else after

If you're running a mobile game or a SaaS product with daily active users, sometimes monitoring needs to be loud. Mention sends reports. Monitr sends alerts every 15 minutes when a crisis signal reaches a threshold.

You also get a weekly digest if you prefer something quieter for non-urgent signals. But the crisis piece isn't negotiable. If your app goes down on a Sunday and your reviews start filling with complaints, you need to know in minutes, not hours.

We built that because we've lived that panic. You probably have too.

Who this is actually for

Mention works well if you're a brand agency tracking mentions across dozens of channels, or a PR team guarding reputation on social media. If you're a mobile studio, a SaaS founder with an app, a brand manager watching your product, or an agency managing multiple client apps, the tools you actually need are different.

Monitr starts free for one app with 50 mentions a month. Our Studio plan covers five apps and 5,000 mentions at £99 a month. Pro goes to 20 apps and 50,000 mentions. Portfolio is for larger teams: unlimited apps, 200,000 mentions, and REST API access to build your own integrations.

The point isn't the tier. It's that we built the tiers for app studios, not broadcast marketers.