About Sift

Why Sift exists

Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji are where a lot of us buy second-hand: the sofa, the kid’s bike, the first car. They are also built to keep you scrolling. Paid listings sit among the real ones. The lamp you opened on Monday is still there on Friday, next to a “$1” recliner that isn’t $1. A 25 km radius reaches the next city over. The good listing went to whoever happened to refresh at the right minute, and the bad one asked for a deposit first.

None of that is hard to fix. It just isn’t the sites’ job to fix it, because they are paid by sellers and advertisers. So we built a tool that works only for the buyer: it clears what you’d skip anyway, marks the price drops and the red flags, and tells you when something new turns up. Then it gets out of the way.

What we believe

Free means free. Every feature on this site is free, with no account, no card and no trial.

Private by design. Sift runs in your browser. There is no Sift account, no analytics and no Sift server, so there is nothing about you for us to keep, lose or sell. Your listing history stays on your computer. The privacy policy says the same thing in more detail.

Buyer side only. Sift changes what you see. It never posts, messages, likes or buys anything, and it never logs in for you.

Show the working. Every listing Sift hides keeps the reason it went, and every warning chip shows the words that triggered it. We don’t publish reviews, ratings or user numbers we can’t back up, and we never will.

How Sift is paid for

Today, it isn’t. Sift is free. Sift Pro is in the works: it will add optional extras for people who shop Marketplace every day, and it is how Sift will pay its way. Nothing that is free today will move behind a paywall. There will be no ads, and no selling of data, because Sift collects none.

How we write our guides

Our guides exist to answer buyers’ questions, whether or not the answer involves Sift. Each one follows the same rules:

1. The question first, for every device. Each guide answers its question for the Facebook or Kijiji app, a phone’s browser and a computer before Sift comes up, and names the way to do it without Sift.
2. Tested and dated. Steps are tested on the live Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji sites, and the date of the last real update is shown at the top.
3. Sourced. Claims about scams, payments and platform rules link to primary sources: Meta’s and Kijiji’s help centres, the US Federal Trade Commission, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, police services and consumer regulators.
4. Reviewed every quarter. Facebook and Kijiji change their pages often, so we re-check each guide every three months. The Updated date changes only when the content does.
5. Honest about Sift. Sift appears in one section of each guide, with what it does and doesn’t do. When Sift isn’t the answer, as with most questions about rentals or meeting safely, we say so. We never rank our own product in a comparison.

If you spot something out of date or wrong, tell us and we’ll fix it.

Contact

Email [email protected] for questions, corrections, press and partnerships.

Sift is not affiliated with Meta, Facebook or Kijiji. All trademarks belong to their owners.