monitoring brand mentions across reddit/twitter, scripts break constantly

run social media for a b2b saas. need to track when people mention our brand or competitors across reddit, twitter, some industry forums. mostly for support (catching complaints early) and competitive intel.

built scrapers that scan every hour. reddit api, twitter api (the free tier), couple forums with beautifulsoup. worked great for like 2 months.

now its a nightmare. twitter changed their api limits last month. free tier is basically useless now. cant afford the paid tier so had to switch to scraping twitter web pages directly but that gets blocked fast. reddit keeps shadowbanning my bot accounts even though im using their api properly. no idea why.

forums are worse. one site added cloudflare, now i cant get past it. another one changed their thread structure, script pulls garbage data. spent 3 hours last week debugging why it kept grabbing ad text instead of actual posts.

the annoying part is i need real time monitoring. if someone posts a complaint about our product, i need to know within an hour not next day. but every time something breaks i dont notice til way later cause im in meetings or whatever.

tried zapier and make. they dont handle reddit/twitter well. too slow and cant do complex filtering. looked at brand monitoring tools like mention or brandwatch. $300-500/month and they still miss stuff on smaller forums.

honestly thinking about just hiring a VA to manually look for things but that defeats the whole point of automation. plus they wont catch stuff at 2am when people actually post.

anyone doing social monitoring at scale? how do you keep it running without babysitting it constantly. testing a few things now but curious what actually works long term