Is Marketplace Monitor Free? Cost, and the Best Alternatives

Marketplace Monitor and its alternatives at a glance

Every figure here comes from each vendor’s own public pages, checked 26 October 2026. Nothing here reflects hands-on testing of a competitor. Alert tools change their prices often, so re-check before you commit to an annual plan.

What Marketplace Monitor is

Marketplace Monitor is an alert service for resellers. You give it a search, it watches the marketplaces you pick, and it sends a push notification to your phone when a new listing matches. Based on its public pages, checked on 26 October 2026, this is what you get:

• Marketplaces. Its homepage names Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, OfferUp, eBay, Kijiji and Gumtree. Its custom package calculator also offers Depop, Vinted and Shpock; the standard plans are headed “Facebook Marketplace Packages”.
• Apps. iOS and Android apps, plus a desktop web version. On the US App Store it was rated 3.4 from 75 ratings on 26 October 2026.
• Delivery. Push notifications.
• Extras. Spam filtering, search refinement and a dedicated account manager listed on every plan, “winning templates” for common searches on the homepage, and a calculator for custom packages, where you can also choose a daily monitoring window of 12 to 24 hours.
• Trial. 7 days, “applied automatically at checkout, cancel anytime”. The pages do not say whether a Facebook login is needed.

It is a multi-marketplace product, and it prices like one. That matters for the rest of this page, because most of the people searching for it buy on Facebook Marketplace and not much else.

What Marketplace Monitor costs

These are the four plans on Marketplace Monitor’s pricing page, checked 26 October 2026. Its calculator switches between USD and GBP; the figures below are the dollar prices, billed monthly, and no annual price is shown.

Two things are worth noticing. First, the search count tops out at five, so someone running a search per product plus a search per city runs out of room quickly. Second, the jump from a two-minute find time to “instant” costs $70 a month on the same five searches. Marketplace Monitor calls the figure an “average find time” (“results can be faster and slower”) rather than a fixed check interval, and it does not publish what “instant” means in minutes.

So the honest answer to “is Marketplace Monitor free” is: for a week. The useful answer is what the same job costs elsewhere.

The alternatives, compared

The table at the top has every tool side by side, from each vendor’s own pages checked on 26 October 2026. Swoopa’s committed prices are $28 (Go, 12 months), $99 (Turbo, 6 months) and $199 (Nitro, 6 months), or $47, $144 and $352 month to month. The line that matters is the one where you stop comparing headline prices and compare what you would actually run. If you are paying Marketplace Monitor for Facebook searches, the picture is this:

• Three searches. Marketplace Monitor Intermediate is $44.99. Outpost Standard is $39 and gives you five watchlists, the fastest checking every 3 minutes.
• Five searches. Marketplace Monitor Expert is $99.99, or $169.99 for “instant”. Outpost Pro is $79 for ten watchlists, the fastest checking every minute and the rest every 3 minutes or slower.
• One search. This is the one case where Marketplace Monitor’s Starter plan is quicker than Outpost Basic, which checks every 30 minutes. If a single search matters that much, Outpost Standard at $39 gives it a 3-minute check with four more watchlists alongside.

Swoopa and Flipify are covered in more depth in the Swoopa review and Swoopa alternatives, and if Swoopa is your main alternative, there is a head-to-head of Swoopa against Marketplace Monitor. CarSnipe is cheaper again, but it watches vehicles and nothing else, and it runs as a browser extension on a Windows or Mac computer that has to stay on, so it only makes sense if cars are the whole business; the CarSnipe review has the detail.

Is there a genuinely free alternative?

Not one that does the job properly. The free options are these, and each has a catch.

• Facebook’s saved searches. Free, and they do sometimes notify you. Facebook does not say how often they run, and in practice they are inconsistent. The mechanics are in saved searches on Facebook Marketplace.
• Sorting by date listed. Free and reliable, but only when you are looking. Seeing the newest listings explains the filter and its limits.
• Do-it-yourself scripts and bots. Free in money, not in time: login walls, rate limits and constant maintenance. The Discord bot guide compares building one with using a hosted webhook.
• Free trials. Marketplace Monitor, Swoopa, Flipify and CarSnipe give you 7 days (Flipify and CarSnipe ask for a card or payment method); Outpost gives you 3. A trial is the right way to test whether alerts help you. It is not a plan.

Use the free options to find out whether you want alerts at all. Once you know you do, the thing you are paying for is a published, predictable check interval, which none of the free options give you.

Why refreshing the app never wins

Every tool on this page is selling the same thing underneath: time. It is worth being clear about why.

A genuinely underpriced listing is usually written by someone who wants the item gone this week. A couch priced to clear before a move, a phone listed at what the owner vaguely remembers paying, a set of tools from a shed clean-out. It collects its first message within minutes and a queue behind that. Within the hour it is often marked pending.

You cannot beat that by refreshing the app. Checking six times a day sounds diligent and still leaves gaps of two or three hours, and the profitable listings are created and claimed inside those gaps. Nobody sustains more than that for a month, and nobody refreshes while they sleep, drive or work.

That is why the check interval is the one specification that changes your results. The difference between a 30-minute check and a one-minute check is not convenience. It is the difference between being the first message in the seller’s inbox and the ninth. Everything else on a pricing page, including the number of marketplaces, is a preference by comparison. Finding underpriced items covers the valuation half of this.

How to choose

Four questions settle it, in this order.

• Do you actually buy outside Facebook Marketplace? Not “would you like to”. If you have not bought on Craigslist, OfferUp, Vinted or Gumtree in the last three months, you are shopping for a Facebook tool, and multi-marketplace pricing is not for you.
• How many searches do you run? Count them honestly: one per product, times one per city if you buy in more than one. Five is where Marketplace Monitor’s fixed plans top out.
• Where should the alert land? A push notification on your iPhone or Android phone, a Discord channel your buying partner also reads, or a dashboard on a second screen.
• How much junk can you tolerate? A keyword match is not the item. The tool that sends forty good alerts beats the one that sends three hundred mixed ones.

For most resellers the answers are: Facebook only, three to ten searches, a phone push or Discord, and very little patience for junk. That is a description of Outpost Alerts. Marketplace Monitor is the better fit only if the first answer was a genuine yes and five searches is enough.

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 an iPhone app, a web dashboard or Discord. It does that one marketplace, on purpose, and it searches from its own servers, so it does not need your Facebook login.

Each watchlist has its own keywords, exclude words, price range, and one location with a radius from 5 to 500 km. It checks in the cloud on a fixed interval: every 30 minutes on Basic, every 3 minutes on your fastest watchlist on Standard (the other four 5 minutes or slower), and every minute on your fastest watchlist on Pro (the other nine 3 minutes or slower). Basic is $14.99 a month for one watchlist, Standard $39 for five and Pro $79 for ten, in US dollars on the web, each with a 3-day trial and no free plan.

Where it differs most is filtering. Across 30,777 listings that matched a keyword, 38.6% were discarded as not the item being searched for — 18,890 kept and 11,887 rejected. On a search for “PS5” that is the controllers, the games, the empty boxes and the wanted-to-buy posts never reaching your feed.

The limits are worth stating plainly. No Craigslist, OfferUp, Gumtree, eBay or Vinted. No price-drop alerts and no resale valuation. No Android app: Android users use the web dashboard or Discord. It tells you a listing exists and matches; whether it is a good buy stays your call.

If that scope fits, it is the cheaper way to cover more Facebook searches faster than Marketplace Monitor’s equivalent plans. Keyword alerts covers writing searches that do not drown you, and the alert app comparison has the wider field.

Switching without losing a week

If you are mid-trial or already paying, move carefully rather than quickly.

• Write your searches down first. Keywords, price range, location, radius and exclude words. No alert tool imports another tool’s searches.
• Run both side by side. The only comparison worth anything is the same search on both tools at the same time, counting what arrived, how quickly, and how much of it was junk.
• Cancel before the trial rolls over. Put the trial end date in your calendar the day you sign up, for every tool you test.
• Do the annual maths last. A year’s commitment to a tool you have used for four days is how people end up searching for alternatives.

Once the searches are running, the best things to flip is a good list of where speed pays off most.

FAQ

Sources checked

• Marketplace Monitor: marketplaces, apps, delivery and trial, checked 26 October 2026.
• Marketplace Monitor pricing: plans, searches, average find times, calculator and prices, checked 26 October 2026.
• Apple App Store (US): Marketplace Monitor rating, checked 26 October 2026.
• Swoopa pricing: plans, commitments and alert speeds, checked 26 October 2026.
• Flipify: watchlist pricing, scan intervals, trial and marketplaces, checked 26 October 2026.
• CarSnipe: plans, check intervals, extension, trial and delivery, checked 26 October 2026.

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