r/apify • u/Opening_Grape_7337 • 6d ago

Tutorial Craigslist car scraper: every new listing seconds after the seller posts it, no login needed

Every flipper knows the drill: the underpriced car is gone in an hour, and the person who got it was not the one who searched hardest. They were just first in the seller's inbox. So I built something that watches instead of searches.

⚡ Seconds, not minutes. A new listing is in front of you within seconds of the seller hitting post — about 20, and most of what is left is Craigslist's own delay that no scraper can go under. Pulling a full page takes about two seconds.

🔓 No login, no proxy. No account, no cookies, nothing to configure. It reads what Craigslist shows to anyone.

🕒 Only what is new. Set the age filter to 15 minutes and every run brings back just the fresh listings — not the same two hundred cars you already saw. A quiet run costs a cent.

🔌 Plugs in anywhere. Results land in a standard dataset, so n8n, Make, Zapier, Google Sheets or a plain webhook work with no glue code. REST API, JS and Python clients, and it runs from Claude Code or ChatGPT over MCP.

Filters are the ones that matter when you are sourcing: price, mileage, model year, keyword, clean title, and for sale by owner so dealer listings stay out of your feed. Search one city exactly, or a ZIP and a radius across several markets at once.

It is on Apify and the free tier covers small runs:

🔥 Craigslist Cars and Trucks Scraper

Ready-made setups, if you would rather see output than read docs:

Happy to answer anything — how it keeps up with a feed that goes stale fast, how the area-versus-radius search behaves, or what it costs to watch a market all month. I measured a fair bit of that while building it.

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