@Robert Diaz @Ghassen Walha @Tajuan Jones @Harsh Kumar @Dean Rowatt @Fred Tillman @Graham Hassell @John Gay @Purva Pawar @Brendyn M @Jessika Bush @Elite vardhanYT @Kathy Kaiser @Rohit Singh @Donna DiGrazia really glad you all found your way in

@Charlotte Chang @Dawn Turk @Claudia Garcia @Denise Ferguson @Avis Fernandes welcome aboard

@Fred Tillman Hey Fred, this is a good one to pick — it splits into two very different problems, so let me take them one at a time. Craigslist is the easy half, and it's basically free. Any Craigslist search results page has a built-in RSS feed — scroll to the bottom of the results and there's an RSS button. Set up your search exactly how you want it (keywords, category, price, distance), then grab that feed URL. Drop it into a reader like Inoreader or Feedly and every new ad matching your search shows up automatically — no clicking through pages, no subscription. That alone kills most of the monotony. Facebook Marketplace is the harder half because Facebook actively blocks scraping and has no RSS. So the honest answer is there's no clean free way to watch it hands-off. The realistic route is a ready-made scraper on Apify — search their store for a Facebook Marketplace scraper and you'll find a few. They run on a credit model with a small free monthly allowance, and you pay for how much you run rather than a flat sub. Whether that free tier covers your volume depends on how often you check and how many searches — check the current pricing on the actor's own page before you commit, since those numbers move. Here's the 2026 way to think about it though. Instead of wiring up a separate no-code platform to run this from the outside, the newer approach is to connect the tools inside an assistant like ChatGPT or Claude and have it do the reading and filtering for you. So the pattern that saves you the most isn't just grabbing the ads — it's having AI read the batch and only surface the ones actually worth your time, so you're not scanning 40 listings for 3 good ones. On keeping the cost down: lean on the free stuff first (Craigslist RSS), and only pay for the Marketplace piece where there's genuinely no free path. Don't sign up for an all-in-one 'marketplace monitor' sub — those are the ones that break and still charge you. One last thing — you dropped a real answer under a question about which task to hand off, which is exactly the spirit of the post 🙌 chasing/finding opportunities is a solid first one to automate because it's repetitive and predictable, which is what makes it a good AI target. There's a post on how to spot which tasks are worth handing off first: