Sift for free stuff: real giveaways, close by, soon after they’re posted

A $0 price puts a listing in front of everyone browsing for free stuff, so the free category on Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji fills up with things that aren’t free: a dresser that wants a message for the price, a bookshelf at best offer, a post from someone looking for a crib. Sift clears that out.

Only free listings: what stays and what goes

Turn on Only free listings in Sift’s settings. A listing priced at zero stays when nothing in it asks for money. Everything else goes, each with the reason Not free. While it’s on, it takes the place of your minimum and maximum price.

Sift reads each listing the way a careful buyer would, including the French listings you see on Kijiji in Quebec. A giveaway that mentions what the item cost new, or offers to drop it off for a few dollars, still counts as free.

The last row is there on purpose. Plenty of real givers offer to drop a couch off for gas money, so a delivery fee isn’t treated as bait. It is also the shape of the most common free-item scam, which is why the red flags below matter as much as the filter.

Now and then a real giveaway gets caught with the bait. To judge those yourself, set Sift to dim filtered listings instead of hiding them: they stay on the page, faded, each with its Not free chip, and the pill in the corner counts them.

Watch a Free Stuff search

Good giveaways rarely last the day, and the couch goes to whoever saw it first. Sift can keep an eye on a free search in the background for you.

1. Set your filters first. Only free listings and a distance limit at the very least, because alerts use them.
2. Open the free search. On Facebook, that’s the Free Stuff category at facebook.com/marketplace/category/free, shown for your Marketplace location. On Kijiji, switch on Kijiji in Sift first, then go to Buy & Sell, then Free Stuff, and pick your city: Kijiji shows all of Canada until you do.
3. Watch it. Click the Sift icon and press Watch. It joins your watched searches, and Sift starts checking it in the background.
4. Leave the browser running. Sift keeps checking in the background, even with the tab closed, and lets you know soon after something new passes your filters. With Sift Pro, the alert goes to your phone too.
5. Click the notification to open the search with the new giveaways marked.

New listings go through your filters before they reach you, so a $0 “message for price” never sets off a notification, and neither does a free piano 80 km away. Kijiji’s Garage Sales category works the same way, handy for finding garage sales.

More on the new listing alerts page; for the sites’ own alerts, see free stuff alerts and Kijiji alerts.

Close enough to collect

A free dresser stops being free somewhere around the second hour in a borrowed van. Marketplace measures its radius from a point for your area, and sellers choose the town their listing shows, so a 10 km search still turns up things across the city.

In Sift’s settings, set your home city or town and a distance limit. Sift shows how far each listing is from home, in km or miles, and anything farther is hidden with its distance as the reason. You can also block a town outright, for the one across the bridge you never drive to. More on the distance filter page.

Turn on Hide shipped and partner listings too, so what’s left is stuff a person near you will hand over. It’s the switch our guide to making Marketplace local only leans on.

Fresh listings only

A free listing that’s two days old is usually gone, whatever the post still says.

Sift puts the newest listings first on every search, so you never start on Facebook’s suggested order (the native way to sort by newest resets too easily). You can also hide anything older than an age you choose. Age badges such as <1h and 3h show at a glance how fresh a listing is.

Listings you’ve already looked at can be dimmed or hidden, or you can show only what’s new since your last visit. On a free search you check every morning, that leaves just what arrived since yesterday.

Red flags on free listings

People drop their guard when nothing is for sale, and scammers count on it. The Better Business Bureau has warned about a free piano held by a moving company that delivers once you pay a fee. Sift flags common warning signs right on the listing. These are the ones that matter on free stuff:

Ships only catches the free couch with a delivery fee once the seller adds there’s no pickup. Free puppies deserve extra doubt: Meta’s commerce policies don’t allow animals to be bought or sold on Marketplace at all.

Sift looks at listings, never your Messenger or Kijiji chats, so a code request, a mover’s link or a fee that only turns up in conversation is yours to spot. The rule for every version: a real giveaway never needs money, a code or a link from you. The common scripts are in scams on free items, and every flag is on the scam red flags page.

Save it as a preset

One click sets Sift up for a car, a bike, LEGO, trading cards or a phone. A free-stuff preset takes about a minute to build yourself, and once saved you switch to it from the Sift popup.

1. Set the filters the way you want them for free stuff.
2. Save them as a preset in Sift’s settings, with a name you’ll recognise.
3. Switch from the popup whenever you’re after free stuff, and back again when you’re not.

A preset keeps your filters, the red flags and how listings are shown. Your home location and watched searches stay as they are when you switch.

Where it works

Sift works on Facebook Marketplace, and on Kijiji too once you switch it on in Sift, in Chrome, Edge and Brave on a computer. Its alerts arrive as notifications on that computer, or on your phone with Sift Pro. It’s free, with no account to create. On your phone, the native filters in our guide to genuinely free stuff are the place to start. Everything else Sift does is on the features page, and the full list of filters is under Marketplace filters.

Before you collect, the used furniture checklist and the used mattress guide cover what to look for, and free cribs and car seats have their own rules in used baby gear. For curb finds posted outside Marketplace and Kijiji, see where curb alerts turn up.