Is CrowdTangle free? What its replacements cost a small team
Free but closed, sales-led, or self-serve: the three ways to pay for what CrowdTangle did, and the hidden cost in each.
Is CrowdTangle free? Not anymore, and not in the usual sense even before. CrowdTangle was invite-only, offered to approved partners such as newsrooms and researchers rather than sold on a price list, and Meta switched it off on August 14, 2024. For a founder or operator, the useful question is what it now costs to get the same kind of signal, and which of those costs a small team can actually carry.
Three ways to pay for what CrowdTangle did
Every replacement falls into one of three cost models. Each has a different hidden price.
1. Free, but closed. Meta Content Library charges no fees for access or computation. The price is eligibility: you must be affiliated with an academic institution or a nonprofit whose main purpose is research, apply through Meta Research Tools Manager, and pass an independent review by the Secure Data Access Center. For a company, the effective cost is infinite, because you cannot buy your way in.
2. Sales-led. NewsWhip, Lumen by Talkwalker (Talkwalker's new name as it moves closer to Hootsuite) and Brandwatch, which now sits alongside Cision, all start with a demo. None shows a public price on the pages checked for this article. The hidden cost is time: a demo, a quote and a negotiation before anyone sees data. These tools offer engagement data, history and analytics that justify their price for large brands and publishers.
3. Self-serve. AyeWatch and Awario publish prices and let you start today. Their cost is mostly what they leave out.
The numbers that are public
| Tool | Entry price | What you get at entry | Contract |
|---|---|---|---|
| AyeWatch | From $9 a month | Plain-English topics, AI that judges what matters, alerts with summaries in email, Slack, Discord, webhooks or the API | None, cancel any time |
| Awario Starter | $29 a month billed annually, $49 monthly | 3 topics, 30,000 mentions a month, 1 user | Annual for the lower rate |
| Meta Content Library | $0 | Meta data for approved researchers | Application |
| NewsWhip, Talkwalker, Brandwatch | Not published | By demo | Sales-led |
Prices are from each vendor's own site, checked in October 2026.
Cost per useful alert, not cost per month
For an operator, the monthly fee is the smaller number. The bigger one is the time someone spends reading results. Keyword tools return every mention that contains your words, and someone has to sort them. That is where the two self-serve options differ most.
Awario is keyword listening: cheap to start, with Boolean search to help, but each topic still needs tuning and its Starter plan has one seat.
AyeWatch takes a different approach. You describe what you care about in a sentence, such as "a competitor announcing layoffs, a price change or a new product", and its AI judges new items by meaning before alerting you. Each alert arrives with a short summary and its sources. If it saves one person thirty minutes of scrolling a day, it pays for itself quickly at $9 a month.
What you give up at the low end
Be honest about the gaps before you choose the cheap path:
- No Facebook. AyeWatch covers Instagram, X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn and TikTok, plus news, the open web and specific pages, but not Facebook.
- No engagement metrics. If an investor update or a client report needs reach or interaction counts, AyeWatch will not produce them.
- No historical archive. Alerts start from when you set up the monitor.
If any of those is a hard requirement, budget for a sales-led tool and plan for the sales cycle.
A sensible path for a small team
- Write down the three questions you used to answer with CrowdTangle, or would have.
- If any question needs Facebook engagement data, ask whether a researcher partner can access Meta Content Library for you.
- For everything else, set up those three questions as monitors on the AyeWatch Free Preview, which gives three runs with no card.
- Upgrade to Pro only if the alerts are worth reading. There are no contracts or cancellation fees.
The AyeWatch vs CrowdTangle page has the feature table for a quick team decision.
Bottom line
CrowdTangle is not free because it does not exist. Its closest data successor is free only for researchers. For founders and operators who need to know when something important happens in their market, AyeWatch is the lowest-cost option that works today, at $9 a month with no contract.