Last verified: 01 Aug 2026

How to Set Price Alerts on Polymarket and Kalshi (2026)

Neither Polymarket nor Kalshi pushes granular price alerts on arbitrary thresholds from inside its own app. The practical options are a DIY script on the public APIs, a feed bot, or a monitoring service. TruthPing puts a monitor on any live market, checks prices every 30 seconds, and sends one Telegram alert with the full receipt when your threshold is crossed.

What is the fastest way to get price alerts on Polymarket and Kalshi?

Start from what the venues do not do. Neither Polymarket nor Kalshi ships a way to say "alert me when this market crosses 62 cents" or "tell me when this question moves 5 points off its recent range." Both publish public APIs with prices, order books, and trades, so the raw data is there. What is missing is the layer that watches it for you and decides a move is worth a message.

That leaves three routes. A DIY script polls the public APIs and fires when a condition you code is met. A feed bot forwards a stream of events, usually large trades, into a channel. A monitoring service watches a defined set of markets against their own baselines and sends one message per event with the numbers attached. The fastest route to a working alert with no code is the monitoring service: pick a market, set a threshold, done.

What alert types exist for prediction markets?

Repricing: a sustained move beyond the market's own 7-day baseline. The market has to break and hold outside the range it has been trading in, not just print one tick past a line. This is the alert that flags a question actually repricing rather than jitter in a thin book.

Band breach: the price crosses and holds beyond the edge of the 7-day band. It is the stricter cousin of repricing, keyed to the band edge rather than a broad move, useful when you care about a specific boundary the market has respected.

Price level: the price crosses a set price you choose. This is the plain "tell me when it hits 70 cents" alert. No baseline math, just a line you drew and a message when the market touches it.

Volume surge: traded volume runs at a multiple of the market's typical volume. It flags attention arriving, which often precedes or accompanies a price move, and it catches activity a price threshold alone would miss.

Large single trade: one outsized print hits the book. It flags a single large order rather than a broad move or a volume ramp. All five types use thresholds you set yourself, and all five carry the same full receipt when they fire.

How do Polymarket alerts work?

Polymarket's app shows you prices and lets you watch markets, but it does not push granular price alerts on thresholds you define. Its public API exposes market prices, order books, and trades, which is enough to build alerting on top of if you want to run the infrastructure. With TruthPing you skip that: add a Polymarket market to a monitor slot, choose an alert type and threshold, and the price is checked every 30 seconds against your condition.

When the condition is met, one Telegram message goes out with the price at the move, the price now, the spread, the depth, and the detection latency. The market is also part of the public archive, so the alert is permalinked before the question resolves and graded after.

How do Kalshi alerts work?

Kalshi works the same way from your side. The app and the public REST and WebSocket API give you prices, order books, and trades, but not arbitrary threshold alerts out of the box. Public market data on Kalshi's API is available without authentication, so a DIY build is possible, and it is still your job to define an unusual move and keep the alerting honest.

TruthPing treats a Kalshi market exactly like a Polymarket one: one monitor slot, your threshold, a 30-second check cadence, and one Telegram alert with the full receipt when it fires. The 7-day baseline that repricing and band-breach alerts use is computed per market, so a Kalshi question is judged against its own history, not a shared rule.

DIY script vs feed bot vs monitoring service

The three routes trade off setup time, ongoing effort, and cost. The table keeps it honest: a script is cheap to start and expensive to maintain; a monitoring service moves that maintenance off your plate.

The build-versus-buy line here is attention, not code. Writing a script that checks a price is a weekend. Keeping baselines honest, suppressing duplicate alerts, staying up around the clock, and archiving outcomes is the part that quietly becomes a second job.

How fast do alerts actually arrive?

Prices are checked every 30 seconds. When your threshold is crossed, the alert is sent at the next check and delivered to Telegram. So the honest way to describe latency is roughly the check cadence plus delivery time, not a claim of instant. A move that happens one second after a check is caught at the next one.

Every alert carries a detection-latency figure, so you can see how long the move had been live when it was caught rather than guess. There is one alert per event, not a stream of repeats as the price keeps moving, which keeps the channel readable.

What does it cost?

Scout is free with no card: 5 monitor slots, each monitored market's first alert of the day delivered in full, and full access to the Terminal and the public archive. It is enough to watch a handful of markets and see what the alerts look like before paying.

Sharp is $29.99 per month: 50 monitor slots, every alert every time it fires with no daily cap, full alert detail, and position radar, where you can flag "I'm in this" or paste a public Polymarket address, read-only, no keys. Cancel anytime. Everyone starts on the shipped default index, the top 75 markets by order-book depth across both venues, and it is fully editable.

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