Free. Runs in your own GitHub repo. No server, no scraping, no API keys to juggle.
Fork it → add one free key → pick your keywords → GitHub Actions watches the trends and DMs you when something breaks out.
Alerts to:
Data by 
All quiet - no watchlist breakouts in the latest run.
Auto-updated by TrendWatch · powered by Trends MCP
You want to know when "your brand", a competitor, or a whole category starts trending - before everyone else does. The usual options are bad:
- 🧱 Building a scraper → breaks every time Google changes its HTML, needs a server, gets you rate-limited/blocked.
- 💸 Enterprise trend tools → $100s/month, overkill, locked behind sales calls.
- 👀 Checking Google Trends by hand → you forget, you miss the spike, you're late.
TrendWatch is the lazy, reliable middle path: a tiny open-source job that runs on GitHub's free Actions runners, calls the Trends MCP API for clean normalized data, and pings you in Slack / Discord / Telegram / email the instant something moves.
your keywords Trends MCP API you, notified
┌────────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐
│ "your brand" │ │ Google · TikTok · │ │ 📈 Slack │
│ "competitor" │──▶│ YouTube · Reddit · │──▶│ 💬 Discord │
│ "labubu" │ │ Amazon · Wikipedia… │ │ ✈️ Telegram │
└────────────────────┘ └──────────────────────┘ │ ✉️ Email / Webhook│
config.yml (1 clean API call) └──────────────────┘
▲
GitHub Actions runs this on a schedule - for free.
- Click "Use this template" → create your own copy of this repo.
- Grab a free API key (100 requests/month, no credit card).
- In your repo: Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → New repository secret
- Name:
TRENDS_API_KEY· Value: (your key)
- Name:
- Edit
config.yml- add the keywords you care about. - Go to the Actions tab, enable workflows, and hit Run workflow to test it.
That's it. It now runs on a schedule and alerts you. 🎉
Want desktop/phone alerts? Add any of
SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL,DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL,TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN+TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID, or SMTP secrets. With none set, it still logs to the Actions console and updates your README dashboard.
Watchlist breakouts - your keywords, measured for momentum.
🚀 labubu is breaking out on google search: +212% over 7D (1M +140%, 3M +320%)
Breakouts land in your alert channels, get written to reports/ as dated Markdown, and refresh the live dashboard at the top of this README.
| Channel | Secrets to add | How to get it |
|---|---|---|
| Slack | SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL |
Slack incoming webhooks |
| Discord | DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL |
Channel → Edit → Integrations → Webhooks |
| Telegram | TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN, TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID |
@BotFather → new bot |
SMTP_HOST, SMTP_PORT, SMTP_USER, SMTP_PASS, SMTP_TO |
Any SMTP (Gmail app password, Fastmail…) | |
| Anything else | GENERIC_WEBHOOK_URL |
Zapier / Make / n8n / your own endpoint |
Set one, several, or none - each activates only when its secret is present.
Keyword momentum (watchlist):
google search · google images · google news · google shopping · youtube · tiktok · reddit · amazon · wikipedia · news volume · news sentiment · app downloads · npm · steam
The free key gives you 100 requests/month. TrendWatch spends 1 request per (keyword × source) per run. Check your exact math anytime:
python -m trendwatch quotaTotal per run : 2 request(s)
Projected monthly usage by schedule:
daily ~ 60 req/mo [OK ]
every 12 hours ~ 120 req/mo [OVER]
✓ On the free tier you can run up to: daily.
Want more keywords or hourly checks? Upgrade: https://trendsmcp.ai/pricing
The default config (2 keywords, daily) lands at ~60/month - comfortably free. Need more? Upgrade for more keywords, more sources, and hourly checks.
git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/trendwatch.git
cd trendwatch
pip install -r requirements.txt
cp .env.example .env # then paste your TRENDS_API_KEY into .env
python -m trendwatch check # validate config + key
python -m trendwatch test # send a test alert to your channels
python -m trendwatch run # do a real check now
python -m trendwatch quota # see your monthly usageIs this just a Google Trends scraper? No. There's no scraping anywhere in this repo - it makes authenticated API calls to Trends MCP, which returns clean, normalized (0-100) trend data across 15+ platforms. No fragile HTML parsing, no Playwright, no proxies, no getting blocked.
Do I have to pay? No. The free tier (100 req/month) covers daily monitoring of a small watchlist, which is what most people want. You only pay if you want more keywords, more sources, or higher frequency.
Will my API key leak if my repo is public? No. Your key lives in GitHub Secrets, never in the code, and isn't exposed in logs or to forks of your repo. Everyone who uses TrendWatch brings their own key - there is no shared key in this template.
Where does the data come from? From the Trends MCP API, which aggregates and normalizes signals from Google, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Amazon, Wikipedia, app stores, and more. See trendsmcp.ai/docs.
Can my AI agent use the same data? Yes - Trends MCP is a Model Context Protocol server, so Claude, Cursor, and other MCP clients can query trends directly. TrendWatch is the "set-and-forget alerts" companion to that. See the docs.
If TrendWatch is useful to you, a star helps others find it 🙏
PRs welcome - new notification channels, smarter detection, nicer reports. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
Star this repo so others can find it, and Use this template to spin up your own trend radar in a minute.
Built with Trends MCP - live trend data for AI assistants, agents & automations.
TrendWatch is an open-source community project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google, TikTok, Reddit, Amazon, or any other platform named above. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.