Monitoring

Monitor Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist & OfferUp for Deals

One description, one map pin, three marketplaces watched all day. BigFlippa checks them for you and flags what is priced below what it is worth.

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Why one marketplace is never the whole picture

The three big used marketplaces overlap, but not enough to pick one and forget the others. Facebook has the reach, and Meta has said more than a billion people visit Marketplace every month. Craigslist keeps a population of sellers who have never opened the Facebook app and run a separate site for every metro. OfferUp leans toward phones, furniture, and everyday household items, with its own search alerts that live inside the app.

Monitoring one of them by hand is tedious. Monitoring all three by hand is a part-time job: three sets of saved searches, three notification systems that behave differently, and three places to remember to check. The point of a monitoring tool is to collapse that into one feed.

Each marketplace behaves differently. Plan for it.

A monitoring tool that pretends the three sources are interchangeable will quietly mislead you, usually about geography. Here is how each one actually responds to the same search.

Source	How the radius behaves	Worth knowing
Craigslist	Exact. 15 miles means 15 miles.	The local site and the category are both derived from your pin and your wording.
Facebook Marketplace	Searched from your pin, but the radius is not passed through.	Results can come from wider than your territory. Facebook does report sold listings, so they get marked gone quickly.
OfferUp	Rounded up to 5, 10, 20, 30, or 50 miles.	A 12-mile territory is searched at 20, so expect some results from just outside.

None of this is hidden in the product, and the full behaviour is written up under territory and radius and marketplaces. It matters most when a pickup is only worth doing inside a certain drive.

One search, three sources, switchable

You set a monitor up once. Describe the item in plain English, drop a pin, set a radius. BigFlippa derives the actual marketplace searches from that description, shows them to you before saving, and then runs them against every source your plan allows.

Sources are per monitor, not per account, so you can mix. Craigslist alone for the local cash-pickup stuff. All three for a category you want blanket coverage on. Facebook and OfferUp only, if Craigslist in your area is a wasteland for what you hunt. Toggling a source affects only that monitor, and a monitor with every source switched off shows a warning in the dashboard rather than silently finding nothing.

Everything found lands in one dashboard with the source labelled, so you are working a single list rather than three tabs. Filter by source when you want to, sort by how far below value something is priced when you do not care where it came from.

What always-on actually means here

Worth being precise, because "24/7 monitoring" is a claim most tools make and few honour. BigFlippa scans between 08:00 and 22:00 in the territory's own local timezone. That is a fourteen-hour window every day, covering the hours people actually post, and it is why alerts go quiet overnight rather than because something broke.

Your plan caps how many monitors run at once, not how many exist. Pausing one frees its slot immediately and keeps everything it has already found, which makes seasonal rotation practical: patio furniture in June, snowblowers in November, neither competing for a slot in the months it is pointless.

If a subscription lapses, scanning stops and nothing is deleted. Monitors and saved listings are all still there when a plan is active again.

What monitoring costs across three marketplaces

Facebook Marketplace on its own starts at $10 a month. Adding Craigslist and OfferUp starts at $15. Higher tiers buy more concurrent monitors and faster alerts, running from 10 minutes down to 2 to 3 minutes, and the pricing page has the exact figures per tier.

The honest way to judge it during the 7-day trial: set one monitor on the first day, not the sixth. A few days of real results tells you whether your description and your territory produce the listings you wanted, which is the only question that matters.

Frequently asked questions

What is a marketplace monitoring tool?

Software that keeps checking used marketplaces for listings that match criteria you set, instead of you running the same searches by hand. BigFlippa monitors Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and OfferUp from one saved search and alerts you when something matches.

Which marketplaces does BigFlippa monitor?

Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and OfferUp. Each search can use any combination of them, and individual sources can be switched on or off per search without affecting your others.

Does monitoring run around the clock?

Searches run between 08:00 and 22:00 in the territory local timezone, every day, without you opening anything. Nothing is scanned outside that window, which is also why alerts go quiet overnight.

Why monitor three marketplaces instead of one?

Because their inventory only partly overlaps. Craigslist carries sellers who never open Facebook, OfferUp skews toward phones and everyday household goods, and Facebook has the largest audience of the three. Watching one means missing whatever the other two carried that day.

How much does monitoring all three marketplaces cost?

Facebook Marketplace on its own starts at $10 a month. Covering Craigslist and OfferUp as well starts at $15 a month. Higher tiers add more concurrent searches and faster alerts, and first-time customers get a 7-day free trial.

Watch all three, check none of them

Set one monitor across Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and OfferUp, and spend the week reading results instead of running searches.