Creating a Radar

A Radar is created through a five-step wizard: Name → Prompt → Review → Territory → Notifications. Only two of those steps need real thought — the prompt, which drives everything downstream, and the review step, where you confirm what BigFlippa is actually about to search for. This page covers every field, then what happens when you edit a Radar later.

What each field does

Name

Up to 99 characters. Purely a label for you — it appears in your dashboard and in the subject line of every alert. Nothing about it affects what the Radar searches for.

Prompt

Between 10 and 500 characters, in plain English. This single field is used twice:

1. To generate the searches. The AI reads it and works out which marketplace searches will surface what you described.
2. To score every listing. Each listing that comes back is compared against this exact text, and only the ones that match well enough become Pings.

Because it does both jobs, the way you phrase it matters more than any other setting. Writing a good prompt covers what to include and what does not work.

Searches

On the Review step, BigFlippa shows the searches it derived from your prompt. These are the literal queries it will run against the marketplaces.

You can edit each one inline, remove any that miss, and add your own. Clearing a search’s text deletes it. Duplicates are dropped automatically, ignoring case, so adding a search that only differs by capitalisation will not consume a slot. How many searches a Radar can watch depends on your plan — see pricing.

Read them before you continue. If your prompt was ambiguous, this is where it becomes obvious, and it is far cheaper to fix here than to wonder later why the alerts are off.

Territory

A pin on the map plus a radius around it. Set the pin by searching for a place, using your current location, or dragging the map. See territory and radius for how the radius is applied per marketplace, and why the pin also determines when your Radar scans.

Notifications

Which channels this Radar uses — email, SMS, or both. If you enable SMS without a phone number on file, you will be prompted for one; the number is saved to your account and shared by every Radar.

Both channels can be off. The Radar still collects Pings in your dashboard, it just will not reach out. See notifications for the notification level, which controls how selective the alerts are.

What you can change later

Open the Radar and use the Details tab. Editable in place:

• Name — saves when you click away.
• Prompt — saves when you click away.
• Source marketplaces — toggle each source on or off.
• Notifications — channels and notification level.
• Territory — move the pin or change the radius, then use Update location.

The search queries themselves are read-only. They are derived from the prompt, so the way to change them is to change the prompt.

What happens when you change the prompt

Editing the prompt is not a cosmetic change. BigFlippa:

1. Re-runs the AI to derive a completely new set of searches.
2. Rebuilds the Radar’s targets on every enabled marketplace.
3. Clears the cached scores, so listings it has already seen get re-evaluated against your new criteria.

Your existing Pings stay in the dashboard. Which sources you had enabled is preserved. But expect a burst of activity afterwards as previously-seen listings are re-scored against the new prompt.

Changing only the territory is lighter — the searches are kept as-is and only the targets are rebuilt.

Why an edit might be rejected

Criteria changes are rate limited. If a Radar is more than an hour old and you have already updated it within the last 24 hours, a further change to the prompt or territory is rejected with an error saying the Radar was updated too recently.

The grace period in the first hour is deliberate: it lets you fix a Radar you just created and immediately regretted. After that, plan on roughly one criteria change per day. Name, notification, and source-toggle changes are not affected.

If you need to iterate faster than that, create a second Radar rather than fighting the cooldown — you can pause or delete the one you were tuning, and a paused Radar does not count against your active limit. See plans and limits.

Related: Writing a good prompt · Territory and radius · Plans and limits