Alerts: 1 free with a daily digest, Plus within 15 minutes, price-cut notifications

An alert is a saved search that we check for you and e-mail you when a car matching your criteria appears or when one of them gets cheaper. It is handy when you have been looking for a specific car for weeks and don't want to go through the marketplaces by hand every day.

How to set up an alert.

1. Sign in. Alerts belong to an account, you can't create them without signing in.
2. In search set the make, model and filters the way you want them.
3. Click Save search, name the alert and choose whether you want e-mail notifications and whether to be told about price cuts too.

Free and with Plus. A free account has one alert. Once a day it goes through the stored listings and sends a summary of what is new. With Plus you have up to ten alerts and we check them every 15 minutes, including directly in the free sources, so you hear about a new car soon after it is posted. Dealer has even more alerts. The plans are compared on the pricing page.

Price cuts. The option Also tell me about price cuts adds to the notification the cars from your search whose price has dropped. If the filter Price dropped only is switched on in the search, the alert sends you only the cars with a price cut.

Managing alerts. On the page My alerts you see all your alerts, how many listings match each and when it last ran. You can pause, reactivate or delete each one, and switch the price-cut notifications on or off for each separately.

When you have more alerts than your plan allows. For example after Plus ends. The alerts stay saved, but we only check the newest ones up to the limit of your plan. The others show the label Over plan limit. When Plus is active again, they start running again.

Tips.

• A narrowly set alert (year, mileage, price, fuel) sends fewer notifications, but each one is worth your attention.
• If an alert sends you nothing for a long time, try the search to see how many cars your filters return and loosen one if needed.
• Notifications go to your account e-mail. If they don't arrive, check the spam folder.

Did an alert miss a car that you then found on a marketplace, or is it sending something you don't expect? Describe it here along with the alert's criteria and we will take a look.