Scrolling Facebook Marketplace for hours drove me crazy, so I built an AI sniper bot at 15.
Hey everyone,
I’m 15, and I’ve been trying to flip PC hardware and graphics cards around the DMV area to make some extra money on the side.
When I first started out, I was spending hours every single day manually refreshing Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. It was honestly exhausting. To make things worse, every single time I actually stumbled onto an insane deal, some other flipper had already bought it before I could even finish typing a message. I realized pretty quickly that a human just can't compete with code when it comes to raw speed.
So, I decided to take a break from the manual grind and built a Python bot to handle the entire hunting process for me.
Here is a quick look at how the pipeline works:
- The Scanner: It uses Playwright to scrape local listings every 15 minutes. I originally tried running it on Google Cloud, but Facebook instantly blocklisted my IP. I fixed it by hosting the script on an old Dell OptiPlex micro unit plugged directly into my home Wi-Fi.
- The Math: It pulls strings from titles and descriptions and cross-references them against a "price book" database I wrote of over 200 CPUs and GPUs to calculate real-time used market value.
- The AI Layer: If a system looks cheap, the bot pushes the listing photos and description straight to the Claude API. The AI acts as a second pair of eyes, flagging common marketplace scams, spotting damage like cracked side glass, and even drafting a custom negotiation script I can copy and paste to the seller. It also auto-generates a drafted eBay post description for an even speedier workflow.
Right now, the script is firing about 15-20 highly profitable alerts every day straight into a private Discord server I set up on Whop.
As a teenager trying to learn computer engineering, building this data pipeline has been an awesome challenge. I'm trying to figure out if I should just keep this bot completely private for my own flipping inventory, or if other resellers out there would actually want access to these real-time alerts.
I currently have a few 3-day free trial slots open for the Discord feed. If you're a local tech flipper, a developer, or just want to check out the project architecture, let me know your thoughts in the comments below! I'd love some constructive feedback on the backend setup from other builders.
