Free Facebook Marketplace Alert Apps: What You Actually Get

The four kinds of free

“Free Marketplace alerts” covers four quite different things, and it helps to separate them before comparing apps.

• Facebook’s own saved searches. Built into Marketplace, free forever, no extra app. Facebook decides when and whether to notify you.
• Free tiers of paid tools. A permanently free plan with limits: usually one to three searches, checked about once an hour.
• Day passes and trials. The full paid product, free for a short window, often with a card on file.
• Open-source scripts. Free software you install and run yourself, on your own computer or server, logged in to your own Facebook account.

Each has a real use. The mistake is expecting any of them to do the job of a paid alert tool for buying in a competitive category, because the thing that makes an alert worth having — checking often, around the clock, without you babysitting it — is exactly the thing that costs money to run.

Every free option compared

Figures are from each vendor’s own public pages (and, for DealScout, its App Store listing), checked 26 September 2026. Nothing here reflects hands-on testing of a competitor. Prices are in US dollars unless stated.

Swoopa, Flipify and Marketplace Monitor have no free plan either; each offers a 7-day trial, and Flipify asks for a payment method up front.

Facebook saved searches: free, and unpredictable

The obvious free option is the one already on your phone. Search Marketplace for what you want, save the search, and Facebook may notify you when something new matches.

It costs nothing and takes ten seconds, so it is worth doing. The problem is the word “may”. Facebook does not say how often saved searches run or guarantee that a notification will arrive, and in practice the timing differs from one account to the next. Some people get a notification within minutes; many get one hours later, or never, or find the setting has quietly switched itself off. Our guides to saved searches and to notifications that stop working cover the mechanics and the fixes.

Saved searches also carry Facebook’s own search limits. There is no way to exclude words, so a search for a PS5 brings cases, controllers and empty boxes with it, and the results are ranked by Facebook’s suggestions unless you sort them yourself.

Use saved searches to find out whether alerts are useful to you at all. They are a poor answer once you know they are.

Free tiers, day passes and what they include

DealScout

DealScout, from Summit Tech Group, is a phone app. Its free plan gives you one search (a “Scout”) that updates hourly, with positive and negative keywords and a distance setting. Paid plans alert “within 5 minutes”: Fast Finder at $39.99 for 3 search terms, Deal Master at $59.99 for 5 and Pro Scout at $99.99 for 10, according to its App Store listing. It covers Facebook Marketplace, and its version history shows Craigslist being added.

SuperFlip

SuperFlip’s free Hobby plan runs 3 live searches (“hunts”) with hourly scans and sends push and email alerts, each with comparable sold prices attached. Pro is $29 a month. Its pricing page did not show the prices of the higher plans on the day we checked. SuperFlip’s main idea is estimating profit on each listing, which we compare with plain alerting in our look at Marketplace deal finders.

Crawlbench

Crawlbench offers a one-off Day Pass: one monitor for 24 hours, no card needed. After that, plans run from $39 a month (Starter) to $199 (Pro), with 3-day trials that do need a card. It delivers to email, Telegram, Slack, Discord and a phone app, and describes its scanning as “within minutes” rather than giving a figure per plan.

The pattern across all three is the same: the free version is real, but it is slow or short, and the speed you actually want is on the paid plan.

Open-source scripts: free software, not free time

If you are comfortable with a terminal, there are free projects on GitHub that watch Marketplace for you. One of the more developed is AI Marketplace Monitor, a Python tool that searches Marketplace, can use an AI model to judge whether a listing matches, and notifies you through PushBullet, Pushover, Telegram, ntfy or email. It is licensed under the AGPL.

Free software is not the same as a free alert, though. According to its own documentation, it needs Python 3.10 or later, a Playwright browser and your Facebook login. It only runs while the computer running it is on. And its README states plainly that Facebook’s terms prohibit automated data collection without authorisation, and that it is meant for personal, hobbyist use. Running a scraper logged in to your own account puts that account at risk, not the developer’s.

Then there is upkeep. Facebook changes its pages often, and when it does, a script stops finding listings — frequently without telling you. You find out when you notice the alerts have gone quiet. Our Discord bot guide covers the self-hosted route in more detail, including Hyacinth and scraper platforms. For a developer who enjoys the project, it is a good one. For someone who just wants the listing, it is a second job.

Why hourly is not fast enough

Here is the problem every alert tool, free or paid, is really trying to solve: good listings are gone within the hour, and you cannot beat that by refreshing the app.

A well-priced listing on Marketplace follows a familiar pattern. It goes up, the first message arrives within minutes, a few more follow, and the seller agrees a time with the first sensible buyer and marks it pending. The whole thing is often over before the listing is an hour old. The buyer who wins is not the one who wanted it most; it is the one who messaged first.

An hourly check lands, on average, half an hour after a listing appears, and sometimes the full hour. For anything priced well — a cheap car, a name-brand chair, a console under market — that usually means arriving after the first few messages. The alert still arrives, which feels like it is working. It is just telling you about deals that are already spoken for.

Checking by hand does not close the gap. Sorting by newest listings works while you are looking, but ten checks a day still leave gaps of hours, and nobody keeps it up for a month. This is why the free tiers are hourly and the paid ones are measured in minutes: frequent checking around the clock is the part that costs money to provide, and it is also the part that wins listings.

How to get the most from a free trial

Since a trial is the only free way to use a fast alert tool, it is worth using it deliberately rather than letting it run out in the background.

1. Pick one category you buy often. A trial is too short to learn several markets. Choose the thing you would buy this week if the price were right.
2. Set a real price ceiling. Decide what a good price is before the alerts start, so you can message within a minute instead of deliberating.
3. Add exclude words on day one. Cases, boxes, “wanted”, “parts only”. Our list of exclude words by category gives you a starting set.
4. Have a first message ready. Something short and specific that names a pickup time. Speed is wasted if you then spend five minutes writing.
5. Compare against what you would have seen. Note how many good listings arrived that you would otherwise have missed. That is the number that tells you whether to pay.

If you are weighing several paid tools, our comparisons of Marketplace alert apps and, for Australian buyers, alert apps in Australia cover prices and check speeds side by side.

Where Outpost Alerts fits

Outpost Alerts is an Australian-built service that watches Facebook Marketplace for new listings matching your keywords and sends them to a web dashboard or Discord. It is the strongest next step once you have outgrown the free options. Four reasons:

• Published speed. Your fastest watchlist is checked every minute on Pro, every 3 minutes on Standard and every 30 minutes on Basic. Even Basic is twice as often as the hourly free tiers.
• Measured relevance filtering. Across 30,777 keyword-matching listings, Outpost discarded 38.6% as not the item searched for (18,890 kept, 11,887 rejected). That is more than a third of the noise a keyword alert would otherwise send you.
• Proper search controls. Each watchlist takes include and exclude words, a price range, and one location with a radius of 5 to 500 km.
• A low price to keep going. Basic is $14.99 a month, below the cheapest paid plan of DealScout, SuperFlip or Crawlbench; Standard is $39 for five watchlists; Pro is $79 for ten.

What it does not do should be just as clear. Outpost has no free plan: every plan starts with a 3-day trial, and after that it is paid. It watches Facebook Marketplace only, not Gumtree, Craigslist or eBay. It does not estimate resale value or score deals. And each watchlist covers one location, so several cities means several watchlists. If you only ever want one search checked hourly and can live with missing the best listings, a free tier will do that job and Outpost is not necessary.

The verdict

There is no free app that reliably gets you to good Facebook Marketplace listings first. What free does get you is worth having: saved searches cost nothing, DealScout and SuperFlip will watch one to three searches hourly for as long as you like, Crawlbench gives you a full day free, and open-source scripts give developers complete control.

But hourly alerts arrive after the deals are gone, and the free options that are faster only last a day or need you to run a server. For most buyers, the sensible path is to try saved searches first, and when you find yourself missing listings, start the Outpost Alerts trial: one-minute checks on Pro, a measured relevance filter, dashboard or Discord delivery, and a lower starting price than the paid plans of DealScout, SuperFlip or Crawlbench when the trial ends.

FAQ

Sources checked

• DealScout on the App Store: free plan, paid plans and alert speed, checked 26 September 2026.
• SuperFlip AI pricing: Hobby plan limits and Pro price, checked 26 September 2026.
• Crawlbench pricing: Day Pass, plans, trials and delivery channels, checked 26 September 2026.
• AI Marketplace Monitor on GitHub: requirements, notification channels, licence and terms warning, checked 26 September 2026.
• Swoopa, Flipify and Marketplace Monitor: free plan and trial terms, checked 26 September 2026.

Marketplace features, fees, and policies change. Confirm current rules in Facebook's Help Center before relying on specific details.