How this watches
Once a day, for every person on your list, two questions are put to Etsy. Nothing is predicted and nothing is modelled.
The two questions
- What does this budget buy for this idea today? A live search on that person’s keywords with the price capped at their budget, cheapest first. What is recorded is Etsy’s own total match count — not the length of the page we were handed. The difference matters: “twelve things exist under £25” is a fact, “we asked for twelve” is not.
- Is everything on the shortlist still for sale, and at what price? A direct lookup of the listings you saved. A sold or expired listing still comes back, carrying its state, which is the only reason gone can be told apart from we lost track of it.
What counts as bad news
| Word used | What happened |
|---|---|
| gone | The one you marked as the choice is no longer for sale. |
| nothing at this budget | The search returns zero results at that cap. |
| over budget | The one you chose is still for sale, and has been repriced above the budget you set. |
| much less choice | The field at that budget has fallen below half of the widest it has ever been for that person — or below eight things, which is not a choice however wide it once was. |
Half, not a fixed number. A niche search that has always returned nine is not collapsing when it returns eight; a broad one that returned four hundred and now returns thirty is. One threshold cannot say both, so the test is proportional to that person’s own history — the single widest count ever seen. That is the only number carried from one day to the next.
Changing a budget resets it. The old figure answered a different question, and comparing against it would announce a collapse that was really you deciding to spend less.
When mail is sent
Someone appears in an email when their answer gets worse than the last word we used about them — not worse than yesterday. So:
- Good news is never mailed.
- If a field recovers, or you restock the plan yourself, you already know.
- The same warning is not repeated.
- A person sitting at much less choice for three weeks produces one email, not twenty-one.
- A field wobbling on the line rings once.
- Once we have said much less choice, the count has to climb back to three quarters of the baseline before it counts as recovered. Without that, a field drifting either side of the halfway mark would write to you every other day.
- Nothing that merely moved can drag an email with it.
- What is carried between days is a list of people and one word each. No totals, no prices, no dates. A number that is not in the email cannot cause one.
What it will not do
It will not convert currencies. Etsy sellers price in their own, so a plan can end up holding two. When it does, the total refuses to add up and says so, instead of showing a figure that looks right and is not.
It will not tell you something is a bargain. There is no rating, no score and no recommendation anywhere in this app. It reports whether your own budget still works, and the judgement stays yours.
It will not watch a shop, a seller, or you. Only public listing data is read, and only for the searches you set up.