Why a Daily Check Is Too Slow for a Tight Search

Our free plan checks your search once a day and emails you what's new. It's genuinely free, it has no expiry, and for plenty of people it's all they need.

It is also, for a certain kind of search, completely useless. We'd rather tell you which one you're on before you're disappointed.

The maths

Say you're after a place in a village with thirty apartments, for a fixed weekend, and every one of those apartments is wanted by someone else with the same dates. When something appears, how long do you have?

In practice, hours. Sometimes less. Desirable places in tight markets go the same day they appear, often within the first few hours, because you aren't the only person refreshing.

Now put a once-daily check against that. We look at 06:00. A listing appears at 09:00. Someone books it at 13:00. We look again at 06:00 the next morning and it's already gone, so it never even reaches you as an alert. You didn't lose the listing because we were slow to email you. You lost it because the entire lifetime of that listing fitted inside the gap between two checks.

That's not a bug we can fix with a faster email. The check frequency is the product.

When once a day is completely fine

Flip it around, because this genuinely covers a lot of people.

If you're looking at a city with thousands of listings, your dates are three months out, and you're flexible about which neighbourhood you land in, nothing is going to disappear while you sleep. Places appear faster than they get booked. A daily digest over your morning coffee is a pleasant way to keep an eye on things, and paying us anything would be a waste of your money.

The same is true early on. If your trip is in eight months, a daily check for the next six of them is plenty. You can move up when it gets close.

The three things that change the answer

You need something faster when all three of these are true at once:

1. Supply is tight. A festival town, an island, a small village. Not "a popular city", which usually has plenty of inventory. Tight means you can count the options.
2. Your dates are fixed. If you can shift a weekend, you can take whatever's free and you don't need alerts at all.
3. Good places go within hours. This is the one that decides it. If the window is a day, daily might catch it. If the window is three hours, it can't.

Miss any one of those and the free plan is probably right. Hit all three and you want near-realtime monitoring, and you want it as a push notification rather than an email, because an email you read that evening is just a nicer way to find out you were too late.

What we're not claiming

We can't make a listing wait for you, and we don't get early access to anything. We see exactly what you'd see if you refreshed the page yourself. The only thing we're selling is looking more often than a human reasonably can, and delivering it somewhere you'll actually notice.

That's worth about a fiver a month if you're chasing a hard weekend. It's worth nothing if you're not. The plans are here, and the free one is a real plan, not a trial.