What it costs to look

Every hunt on your page prints its own version of this.

Etsy's API has no era filter

On etsy.com you can tick 1960s and see only the sixties. Through the API that filter does not exist. These are all the parameters the listing search accepts:

keywords limit offset sort_on sort_order min_price max_price taxonomy_id shop_location is_safe currency buyer_country

No era. So decades asks for the newest listings matching your words, reads them, and throws away everything from the wrong decade. There is no cleverer way round it, and any tool claiming to watch Etsy by decade is doing the same thing whether or not it tells you.

So most of what we read is discarded

A hunt reads up to three hundred listings a pass. For a broad phrase, four or five of those might be from the decades you asked for. That ratio is printed on every hunt — "read 300, kept 4" — along with the previous pass, so you can see it getting better or worse.

It is there because it is your lever. A hunt keeping nothing is not broken; it is asking the wrong question. Narrower words, or older decades, and the number moves.

Where the reading stops

• Three pages, three hundred listings, per hunt per pass. If more exist, the hunt says so rather than pretending it saw everything.
• Newest first, and the moment a page ends older than the last thing we reported on, the rest is skipped — everything below is older still.
• Ten hunts per account.

Every six hours

Two facts pull in opposite directions. Vintage is one of a kind — quantity one, sold once, gone — which argues for looking often. And every look is three hundred listings read to keep a handful, which argues for looking rarely. Six hours is where they meet.

What "new" means here

A listing is news exactly once: the first time a hunt sees it. We keep the creation time of the newest listing already reported and ignore anything older, which means no list of what was sent before has to exist anywhere.

The cost of that simplicity: a listing that was always there but only now surfaced in our three pages — because something above it sold — is treated as old and passes silently. It is on your page; it just does not send mail.